Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  “To get one up on Bogie, who thought he was so damn smart, I came up with an idea,” Sherman said. “Since she couldn’t find her straying husband, I invited the bitch for a drink. Before the night ended, I screwed the hot-to-trot harridan. Bogie was none the wiser. He showed up the next day, looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. But I was the one who got his whore. I went back to directing him in his cornball role in this hokey picture, and no one was ever the wiser. What Bogie didn’t realize was that Methot was getting as much on the side as he was.”

  “Bogie’s claim to fame in the boudoir was that he had seduced all three of the Lane sisters when he worked with them in movies,” Sherman said. “I can’t vouch for that, but I did see Rosemary Lane, who had the female lead in Dr. X, emerge on two different occasions from his dressing room. Maybe they were just holding hands or going over the script together. But I doubt that. I really do.”

  “Wayne Morris, the lead, looked good only when he had a hard-on, or so I was told,” said Sherman. “Since we didn’t show hard-ons back then, he didn’t look good on camera, certainly not as an actor. He tried to be funny in the film, once or twice. He fell into a room by leaning against a supposedly locked door which suddenly opened. That was really hilarious. Huntz Hall was the funniest thing in the movie except for Bogie risen from the grave as a leftfield mad doctor.”

  ***

  As Bogie moved deeper into middle age, a new and younger crop of stars was being groomed for the leading roles of the 1940s.

  Although he’d worked briefly under the name of Stanley Morner, the newly emerged “Dennis Morgan” had been assigned three pictures for release in 1939, one of which was The Return of Dr. X. Although he’d be first and foremost a singing star, he would go on to do straight drama, Westerns, light comedies, and even war movies. He’d scored a hit when he sang “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), using his Stanley Morner name. Sometimes he was billed as Richard Stanley.

  “I hear you’re the latest sensation,” Bogie said, coming up to Morgan and extending his hand. “But what name will you be using next year?”

  “From now on, it’s Dennis Morgan to the grave,” the handsome young actor said.

  “I hope you’re not gonna take any jobs from me,” Bogie said. “I have a lot of people to support.”

  “That will never happen, Mr. Bogart,” Morgan assured him.

  Bogie didn’t believe him. “He was an ambitious actor with a gleam in his eye. I think he would have sold me down the river the first chance he got.”

  Although some film historians deny it, Morgan admitted later in life that he, along with Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan, were briefly considered for the star roles in Casablanca. “I shudder to think what would have happened if I had fucked up a classic like that,” Morgan said.

  “I don’t give a damn what all these so-called historians say, I was approached to play Rich Blaine in Casablanca,” he said. “Jack Warner himself talked over the role with me. Ronald Reagan was originally slated to play the Paul Henreid role before Warner considered him for Rick. Ann Sheridan was originally set to play the Ingrid Bergman part. Instead I made Thank Your Lucky Stars —Bogie was in that one too—and The Desert Song, that creaky operetta that was updated to include Nazis. My greatest regret in life was I didn’t get to play Rick. By the 50s, I was on the way out. At least I was remembered for a role in Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood in 1976.”

  In the last months of her life, Maud recalled hearing a sound truck blaring along Hollywood Boulevard hawking The Return of Doctor X.

  WHO IS THE VILEST FIEND IN HISTORY? WHO IS THE MONSTER

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  DESPOILS A WOMAN FOR HIS PLEASURE?

  She called her son to complain. “At least they could have told the world they’re talking about my son, Mr. Humphrey Bogart. If only Belmont had lived to see this cursed day.”

  When the film was released, and as his marriage to Methot crumbled, Bogie was at his most despondent about his career.

  Within a year or so, his luck would change. But first he had to survive a string of upcoming screen disasters. Only his most diehard fans would ever remember those films.

  As Methot herself said, “I sat through two of them, saw only twenty minutes of the third one he made, and didn’t bother to see the final two.”

  ***

  Director Lloyd Bacon, who’d just helmed Bogie and Cagney in The Oklahoma Kid, cast him once again in Invisible Stripes, a film about the ethical struggles of ex-convicts on parole.

  Bogie found his billing in fourth position behind George Raft, Jane Bryan, and William Holden humiliating. Jack Warner had decided to give Holden the lead over Bogie because of his success in Golden Boy, a role Bogie himself had desperately wanted.

  “Guess who I really wanted to play Raft’s brother?” Bacon said. “Not Holden. Wayne Morris.”

  “Why in the fuck is it, that every picture I’m in the director wants to hire this no-talented big prick?” Bogie asked.

  Bacon told Bogie that he was sorry he’d cast Holden in the film. “He’s just too damn inexperienced. But Raft seems to have taken him under his wing. Betty Grable told me that Raft is a& & switch-hitter.”

  “I can confirm that,” Bogie said. “Back in the golden days of Broadway, Raft was banging his roommate, Rudolph Valentino.”

  “Personally, I think Raft has the hots for Golden Boy,” Bacon said.

  “I haven’t read the final pages of this script,” Bogie said to Bacon. “But let me guess. Both Raft and I are bumped off in the final reel?”

  “You don’t even have to ask me that question,” Bacon said. “You already know it’s true.”

  Bogie made his hostility to Holden obvious. One scene called for Holden, with Bogie riding on the seat behind him, to drive a motorcycle into a wall. “That S.O.B., he’ll crack it up!” Bogie shouted at Bacon. Bacon insisted, and Holden aimed the cycle head-on into a wall. Fortunately, both stars escaped unharmed.

  Encountering Raft again, Bogie said, “Me and you old guys are slowly being replaced with studs like William Holden. They call them stars of tomorrow. What are we? Stars of yesterday.”

  “You weren’t a star of yesterday,” Raft said. “I was. Not only that but Jack Warner personally told me that he’ll be lining up a whole string of pictures in the 40s and plans to star me in most of them.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Bogie said, “not that Warner’s promises mean a damn rat’s fart. But don’t count on anything. They may not be making gangster movies in the 40s. Only war pictures.”

  The female lead, Jane Bryan, was polite but reserved with Bogie. They’d last appeared together in the Bette Davis/Edward G. Robinson film, Kid Galahad. In Invisible Stripes, Bryan played “Peggy,” Holden’s girlfriend.

  “Not only does Holden get third billing over me, but he gets the girl while I end up with a bullet,” Bogie said.

  Bacon was tired of listening to Bogie complain. In a cutting dig, he said,& “There are stars in the making like William Holden, already established stars like George Raft, and stars that will never be.”

  Bogie resented the close bond that quickly formed between Raft and Holden, both on and off the set. “George was my big brother in and out of the movie,” Holden said. “In fact if he hadn’t helped me, I might have been thrown out of the picture. He told Bacon to go easy on me.”

  In one scene, though, Holden, straight from the boxing ring of Golden Boy, accidentally rammed his head into the socket of Raft’s left eye, causing damage to Raft that included bruises and stitches.

  “He forgave me,” Holden said, “and I ended up sitting with him all night, applying cold compresses on his eye.”

  Unlike his rather formal reunion with Jane Bryan, Bogie had a warm reunion on set with one of the supporting players, Lee Patrick. She came up to him and gave him a long, passionate kiss. “I have a right to do that,” she said. “Don’t forget you were my husband.�
��

  “I don’t remember us getting married,” he said. “I drank a lot in those days. Still do, as a matter of fact.”

  “No, you silly goose, you were my priggish young husband on Broadway in Baby Mine.”

  Later over lunch, she said, “I know you know how old I am, but don’t tell anybody.

  “Actually, I don’t remember,” he said.

  “I’m only two years older than you, but in Hollywood I claim I was born in 1911. A gal’s got to earn a living, right, and I’m not ready for grandmother parts yet.”

  “Your secret is safe with me.” He looked at her intently. “Are you happily married—or shall we resume our shack-up?”

  “I’m married to a great guy, Tom Wood. We’re really suited to each other.”

  “Are you and I gonna be second bananas in film for the rest of our careers?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid so in my case,”& she said. “I’m resigned to it. My last big chance came when I was considered for the lead in Stella Dallas. Alas, Miss Barbara Stanwyck snagged the role from me. So, whenever Jack Warner has a potboiler, and he needs someone to play a nurse, a floozie, whatever, he can call on me. I specialize in hard-bitten dames.” At the end of the lunch, she kissed him long and hard. “After going to bed with you, I know why they call you Hump.”

  “I’m now called Bogie.”

  Invisible Stripes played for a week in movie theaters along Hollywood Boulevard. During its run, Bogie invited Methot to go with him to see it after dinner at the Brown Derby. The meal went off smoothly, without any physical violence, even though patrons at the other tables waited for The Battling Bogarts to break into a fight.

  But they left the restaurant without any altercation. As Bogie drove up to the Warners Hollywood Theater, he noticed that the marquee read: GEORGE RAFT AND WILLIAM HOLDEN STARRING IN INVISIBLE STRIPES.

  Immediately, Methot accused Bogie of being a wimp for not demanding billing instead of Holden. “Next thing I know, Jack Warner will demand that you lick off Holden’s dingleberries on camera.”

  That started it. The Battling Bogarts launched America’s entry into World War II before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  ***

  Fast forward to September of 1953: The feud between William Holden and Bogie was still percolating when they appeared together on the set of Sabrina, a movie that starred the enchanting Audrey Hepburn. Bogie was the star this time, with Holden billed third. Soonafter, hostilities between “the two roosters” [director Billy Wilder’s words] bubbled over.

  Bogie admitted that “I always knew Wilder wanted Cary Grant for the part, but the faggot turned it down.”

  “Bogie’s face was so weathered at this late hour in his life, I felt audiences would not believe that a cute little number like Audrey would go for this grandfatherly type,” Wilder said.

  In Sabrina, Bogie played a boring, workaholic tycoon, Larry Larrabee, with Holden cast as his playboy brother, David. Both are vying for the prize, young and beautiful Sabrina Fairchild, the daughter of their chauffeur.

  When he made Sabrina, Bogie was fifty-four years old, but Wilder thought he looked “at least sixty-five, maybe more so.”

  Bogie staggered through Sabrina as best he could, but it was obvious to Hepburn that his many years of hard drinking had made him dyspeptic and ill. Unknown to the cast, Bogie was beginning to show the first symptoms of the cancer that four years later would claim his life.

  “Paramount has given me a real problem,” Wilder said. “I have to make the audience believe that Audrey would prefer weathered old Bogie to the handsome, dashing, and gorgeously blond Bill Holden, who was thirty-five but looked twenty-eight.

  Bogie and Wilder feuded right from the beginning, with Bogie calling Sabrina “a crock of crap.” He still didn’t use the word shit. At one point, studying his new lines of dialogue, he asked Wilder if his young daughter had written it.

  Between takes, Bogie reminded Holden that he was earning $300,000 for the picture, as compared to Holden’s $125,000.

  Directly to his face, Bogie called Wilder “a Prussian German with a riding crop.” On other occasions, he called Wilder a “Kraut bastard” or “Nazi.” When Wilder issued an instruction, Bogie mocked him by saying “ Jawoh! ”

  When Hepburn flubbed her lines, Bogie said, “Have you considered staying home and learning your lines instead of going out every night?”

  Holden later complained that on many a day on the set, he almost came “within an inch of knocking Bogie’s teeth out because of the insulting way he was treating Audrey and Wilder, too.”

  As he moved closer to death, Bogie became more and more insecure. He mocked Holden as “Smiling Jim,” and ridiculed his good looks. “More matinee idol than a man.” He even mocked his hair, whose color had been lightened for the role.

  Holden snapped back at Bogie in the press. “He’s an actor of consummate skill, with an ego to match.”

  At one point during a scene, Holden blew smoke in Bogie’s face, making him ruin his lines. Bogie stalked off the set, shutting down production.

  When Bogie’s long-time friend, Clifton Webb, visited the set and asked what it was like working with Hepburn, Bogie replied, “It’s okay if you like to do thirty-six takes.”

  Bogie recalled passing in front of Holden’s dressing room at the end of the day, where, in the words of author Bob Thomas, “he could hear the rattle of ice cubes and the tinkle of Audrey Hepburn’s laughter and Holden’s hearty guffaw as they listened to Billy Wilder’s witticisms.”

  “Those Paramount bastards didn’t invite me,” Bogie claimed. “Well fuck ‘em.”

  Toward the end of the shoot, Bogie learned that Holden had fallen in love with the film’s female star. “I really was in love with Audrey,” Holden told Wilder. “But she wouldn’t marry me. So I set out around the world with the idea of screwing every woman in every country I visited.”

  Irving (“Swifty”) Lazar, who was Bogie’s agent at the time, summed up the tense condition on the set of Sabrina. “Bogie thought that Wilder must humble himself before Bogie. But on a Billy Wilder picture, there is no star but Billy Wilder.”

  At the end of the shoot, Bogie dismissed Hepburn, Wilder, and Holden. “I’d rather drink a quart of rat’s piss than work with either of them again. In fact, I’ve decided Sabrina is going to be my last picture.”

  That was just a drunken vow Bogie made at Romanoff’s to Clifton Webb. Even on his death bed, he was planning to make another picture and another picture.

  ***

  Back in Hollywood in 1939, Bogie was given his latest assignment, a Western called Virginia City, to be directed by Michael Curtiz, whom he met at Romanoff’s for a wet lunch to discuss its details. Both men were just a few short war years from making Casablanca together.

  “I want you to wear a mustache,” Curtiz said.

  “Whatever Herr Director wants,” Bogie replied. “More to the point, what’s the billing?”

  “You’re the fourth lead,” Curtiz said. “It’s an Errol Flynn picture. You’ll absolutely hate the fucker. He’s nothing but a big piss.”

  “I can work with Flynn providing you write in some love scenes between us,” Bogie said.

  “You’re such a kidder,” Curtiz said. “Always make the joke.”

  “Who are the other co-stars?” Bogie asked.

  “Miriam Hopkins and Randolph Scott.”

  “Oh, goodie-goodie, a super bitch and a cocksucker.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The dashing star of Virginia City, Errol Flynn, was remarkably different from Bogie. Self-destructive, sexually wanton, and reckless in his private life, Flynn, like Bogie, had started out at Warners at about the same time, although their careers would follow remarkably different paths. Whereas it would take years for Bogie to reach the top, Flynn burst like a dynamo upon the American public, a strikingly beautiful, romantic figure with enough charisma to obscure his limited acting talent.

  Flynn was a swashbuckler, ex
celling at swordplay both on and off the screen. “I’m a devil-may-care ladykiller,” he said of himself, leaving out mention that he had a great fondness for young boy ass too.

  “Robin Hood,” Bogie said to him on the set. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your green tights.”

  “They were far too tight to hold my big bundle of goodies,” Flynn claimed.

  “This is no reflection on working with you, but I hope this is my last western,” Bogie said. “I’m a big city boy who hates getting cactus in his ass and sleeping with rattlesnakes.”

  “I hear you keep fighting for better roles,” Flynn said. “Not me. I keep fighting Jack Warner for more money. Miriam Hopkins is getting the same paycheck as me, $50,000. Randolph Scott is taking

  home $35,000. How about you?”

  “Would you believe $10,000?” Bogie said.

  The hard-driving Michael Curtiz, of the short fuse, was furious at being assigned to helm another Western. “I know no God damn thing about Westerns,” he said. “Why choose me? All I know is that all that horse riding makes cowboys impertinent.”

  “Don’t you mean impotent?” Bogie asked.

  “Call it what name you want,” Curtiz said. “Let’s don’t fight over words. It means cowboys after all those years in the saddle become no good in the saddle. Get my river gush?”

  “You mean drift, don’t you?”

  “What are you?” Curtiz asked. “Some fucking English teacher? I know English better than you. That’s why dialogue’s my specialty. But you dumb actors can’t say words right.”

  When not fighting with Flynn during the shoot, Curtiz directed most of his hostility toward Hopkins. “Cunt can’t ride horse,” he told Bogie. “Says it’s the time of month for her period. Cunt too old to have period, but claims her vagina’s bleeding.”

  In the final days of 1939, the unit manager wrote Warners: “It grows more difficult each day for Curtiz to handle Miss Hopkins. They have utter contempt for each other. I have never seen such hostility. Perhaps you can fire her and hire Bette Davis instead. The last line is a joke, of course.”