Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  A decade earlier, Burnett had become famous for his crime novel, Little Caesar, based on the life of Al Capone and brought to the screen in a sensational performance by Edward G. Robinson.

  John Huston was called in to tweak the script, but Muni rejected the first version. Warner then decided to ask Burnett himself to work on a screenplay for High Sierra. When Burnett’s version was submitted to the censors manning the Production Code, they objected to the “illicit” sexual relationship spinning around Ida Lupino with unmarried partners. They also found the words “damn,” “tramp,” and even “punk” objectionable.

  & Ida Lupino was cast as the female lead playing Marie Garon, a dime-a-dance tramp willing to run off with whatever man came along.

  In the wake of Muni’s rejection and the perception by the studio that he wasn’t really right for the role anyway, a revised script was submitted to George Raft. He turned it down, claiming he was not going to be killed off in any more films. Huston and Burnett then resubmitted the script to Muni who rejected it once again, even though he thought it had been vastly improved. He rejected it this time because it had been turned down by Raft.

  Next in line, Edward G. Robinson said “no way,”& before the script was shopped to John Garfield. Even though he had no real star power at the time, he, too, rejected High Sierra. Exasperated, Jack Warner said, “Who else but Bogart? He’s a son of a bitch, but what actor isn’t?”

  Even at the last minute, Warner almost didn’t cast him. As he told his friend, Raoul Walsh, “Bogie’s going around telling people I’m a fairy. But if you want to take a chance, go ahead.”

  Why Bogie spread the story that Warner was a homosexual is not known, perhaps in revenge for Warner’s long ago taunting him about his lisp.

  Hard at work on the screenplay, Huston was contemptuous of Raft. “ Everything was intended for Raft at the time. I was not one of his great admirers. I thought he was a clown, walking around in his white suit with those padded shoulders and form-fitting hips, protected by bodyguards. He was very much a Mafia type and liked to display it. And it turned out the poor devil came to nothing. He refused everything that was thrown at him. And he refused High Sierra. You know, he was really an ignorant man. And I was delighted he didn’t do our script because Bogie then got to play it. And I knew Bogie was a fine actor.”

  Huston said that what made High Sierra different from other gangster films was the way Bogie played Roy Earle. “We had seen bad guys, hundreds, maybe thousands of them before, but the bad guy Bogart played was a decent man. He had a sense of loyalty, a code of ethics. He could feel sorry for a neglected dog or a crippled girl and go out of his way to help them. He was essentially a loner, a man up against a system, and even though he knew how to use a machine gun and was on the wrong side of the law, he was likable. The way Bogart played him, you couldn’t help rooting for Roy Earle.”

  Although they knew each other before, it was during the making of High Sierra, that Bogie bonded with Huston. For some reason, Bogie called his future director “The Monster & Double Ugly.”

  Author Axel Madsen said, “John was Bogie’s kind of snake charmer, a natural-born anti-authoritarian, a guy with panache and style. Bogie thought John had more color than ninety percent of Hollywood’s actors. In the future when John would call and say, ‘Hey, kid, let’s make a picture,’ Bogie knew he was being conned but he also knew he would have a great time.”

  On the set of High Sierra, Bogie found every excuse he could to complain about the working conditions. He even attacked the packed lunches the crew was served. “I wonder when this sandwich was made? Last year? Christ, they feed the cons at San Quentin better than this.”

  “In spite of his eternal beefing, Bogie turned in a top performance, jerking tears when he paid for the young lame girl to have successful surgery and setting the audience on the edges of their seats during the robbery and long chase before he died,” Walsh said. “This performance made Bogart a star. He would never have to play bit parts again. He only grunted when he read the good things the critics had to say. His mind seemed to be busy with other things. I think he was still blaming Jack Warner for sending him that lousy lunch.”

  At first, Lupino and Bogie appeared almost hostile to each other on the set. “I have a way of kidding with a straight face,” she later said. “So does Bogie. Neither of us recognized the trait in the other. Each thought the other was being nasty, and we were both offended.”

  Detroit-born Joan Leslie got her first major role in High Sierra, playing a crippled girl. She would soon star with Bogie again. Bogie told Walsh, “I can never relate to good girls like Leslie. They’re so wholesome, so pure, like professional virgins. I don’t think she’ll go far in films. We need Lana Turner, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan, Claire Trevor—you gotta be a bitch to make it big in Hollywood. This town is full of sweet, perky, young things like Leslie.” Later he said, “Imagine being little Joan Leslie, and peaking in your career at the age of twenty-one.”

  As High Sierra was being filmed, Walsh came to Bogie with some good news. Muni and Jack Warner had had a violent argument and Muni was out the Warner door.

  Warner had been on the verge of green lighting a film for Muni about Ludwig von Beethoven. When Warner told him the movie had been canceled, Muni exploded. He severed his relationship with Warners and tore up his seven-year contract. At last, the road opened for Bogie to get better scripts.

  Barton MacLane appeared in High Sierra, but with a tenth billing. Bogie had worked with MacLane before in such films as San Quentin. He would appear with Bogie again in the Forties—in fact, MacLane’s name is kept alive to future generations because of his appearance in three of Bogie’s big movies of the Forties.

  Bogie stayed mainly to himself during early filming. But he did meet and talk with some major actors in the supporting cast, including Alan Curtis. His role as Babe Kozak in High Sierra remains perhaps the most memorable of his career.

  At the time Bogie met Curtis, he was on the dawn of marrying the Hungarian actress Ilona Massey, that shapely operatic blonde from Budapest.

  Curtis discussed his marriage plans. “Massey is not a woman you marry,” Bogie said. “She’s a woman you have make you goulash and then you fuck her.” Curtis seemed insulted but Bogie was giving good advice. The marriage was virtually over in three months, although officially it lasted a year.

  Perhaps the best actor in the supporting cast was a Kentuckian, Henry Hull, a thin man with a furrowed brow who specialized in playing practical oldsters or crotchety types. Over a drink, Bogie told him, “It’s great talking to one of the real pros in the business, The Werewolf of London.” He was referring to Hull’s 1935 hit. Both Hull and Bogie recalled their 1934 appearances in the film Midnight with Sidney Fox.

  By this time, Bogie had been around the Warner lot so long that it became increasingly obvious that he was working with much younger “stars of tomorrow,” some of whom he held with a certain disdain. He was resentful of Arthur Kennedy, because he’d been discovered by James Cagney, who’d cast him in City for Conquest (1940) as his younger, piano-playing brother. When Kennedy brought up the name of James Cagney four times in different conversations, maintaining that Cagney was the best actor in Hollywood, Bogie finally interrupted. “You’re out of your mind, fucker. Cagney can do only one thing well. Dress up in drag and pick up sailors to bed. I hear he’s great at fellatio. Don’t tell me he didn’t put a good-looking guy like you on the casting couch.”

  Kennedy and Bogie would get along better when they starred together in William Wyler’s The Desperate Hours (1955), where Kennedy played a policeman trying to capture Bogie.

  One star of tomorrow who Bogie interacted with was Cornel Wilde, who had only a small role in High Sierra, but would go on to stardom. When Bogie encountered this bisexual actor from Hungary, he was fresh from having taught fencing lessons to Laurence Olivier for his 1940 Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet.

  Bogie had already heard the rumors about Oli
vier and Wilde. “What else did you teach Mr. Olivier?” Bogie asked.

  “How to handle his sword,” Wilde said.

  “I can take that two ways,” Bogie said with a smirk.

  Years later, when Bogie was appearing in Battle Circus (1953) with June Allyson, he ran into Wilde in a restaurant. “How’s it hanging, kid?” he asked.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Wilde said. “I’m in beefcake bondage. I’ve become the darling of the S&M crowd. In At Sword’s Point, I was stripped and bound at the waist in a torture chamber where my chest was burned with a hot iron. In California Conquest, my next picture, I was again stripped to the waist and bound to a tree. I was lashed across my beautiful, golden chest with a whip.”

  “Sounds like kinky fun to me,” Bogie said. “I’ll have to hire some whore to do that to me.”

  As filming progressed, according to Walsh, Bogie was clearly falling in love with Lupino. At first they stayed clear of each other, but as the days passed they became cozier and cozier, taking lunch together, spending time in each other’s dressing rooms, having drinks after work and delaying a return home to their spouses.

  “Bogie knew such an affair could mean nothing but trouble for them,” director Raoul Walsh said. “It was like they couldn’t help it. As for Ida, I don’t think she really loved Bogie, at least not as much as he loved her. She cared for him; she liked him. But I wouldn’t call it love. Several members of the crew disagreed with me, and told me that Ida looked at Bogie with love in her eyes. I think the sex between them was good. Methot was no longer the sex object that she used to be. Also, like many men his age, Bogie wanted someone much younger and prettier on the hoof. Ida was in the relationship for sex. For Bogie, it either love or temporary insanity. If Methot caught him, I truly believe she would have shot him dead, just like Edward G. Robinson used to do on screen.”

  Deeper into the shoot, Lupino and Bogie were drawn even closer to each other. “Too close,” in the words of Huston.

  Somehow Mayo Methot got word of this and began showing up on the set. “If I see that little limey floozy make one move toward my husband, I’ll yank out every hair in her overworked pussy.”

  Dialogue director Irving Rapper said, “Mayo was so jealous of the younger, more beautiful Lupino that she was in a boiling rage. We expected violence on the set.”

  Louis Hayward, Lupino’s husband, also showed up on the set. He’d seen a picture of Bogie in a bathing suit on his knees looking adoringly at Lupino as she rested on a chaise longue by a pool.

  Born in South Africa, but reared in London, Hayward was sophisticated, urbane, and a light second lead that made him one of the less memorable leading men of his day.

  Fearing a fist fight, and often reluctant to engage in battle, Bogie remained in his dressing room until Walsh told him that “the coast is clear. I ordered Hayward to go home.”

  Methot hawkeyed what was going on when High Sierra was shot in a studio. But for seven weeks, the film was shot on location, including a fishing camp and the Arrowhead Spring Resort. The final scene, which included Bogie’s death on film, was in the Sierra Nevada of Eastern California, with Mt. Whitney looming in the distance.

  Location shooting allowed Lupino and Bogie to spend their nights together, living almost like man and wife in full view of the crew. “They did little to conceal their relationship, which surprised me since both of them had jealous spouses,” Walsh claimed.

  In September, the filming of High Sierra came to an end, and under its budget of $455,000. Bogie earned $11,200, with Lupino taking home $12,000. Walsh got $17,500.

  At the end, Lupino and Bogie decided to go their separate ways. In later interviews, she treated him with respect, but denied that any affair ever took place between them. “He was the most loyal, wonderful guy in the world.”

  Critics hailed High Sierra as the last gangster film of the Depression Era. Others called it “the most memorable of the twilight-of-the-gangster pictures.”

  When Lupino went on to make The Sea Wolf (1941), the other stars included Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield. Bogie sent her a note: “Hanging out with my competition. Traitor.”

  ***

  Just as his career was starting to ascend into super stardom, Bogie was labeled a Communist. He likened the accusation to “a bolt of lightning hitting me.” His only political activity had been in the mid-1930s when he backed the striking, underpaid lettuce harvesters in the San Joaquin Valley, and when he had contributed $200 to the strike fund of another underpaid group of workers, the reporters on some Seattle newspapers.

  A witch hunt, evocative of that led by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, had been launched by Congressman Martin Dies, a blond-haired bully who had been appointed head of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives. His claim to fame today is that he ordered his staff “to prove that Shirley Temple was a Communist.” Somehow he found Red propaganda in her motion pictures.

  Dies opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, labor unions, Jews (“especially those of New York”), and all black people. The latter he privately told supporters “should be shipped back to Africa where these jungle bunnies belong.” He didn’t particularly oppose homosexuals since he did not believe “that such perversion” ever took place on American soil.

  Testifying before the Dies Committee in July of 1940 was John L. Leech, who called himself “chief functionary” of the local Communist Party in the Greater Los Angeles area. Before the committee, he named names of the leading Communists in Hollywood. Heading the list was Humphrey Bogart, followed by Fredric March, Melvyn Douglas, James Cagney, and Franchot Tone. On August 15, 1940 in a front-page story, Bogie was cited for attending Communist study groups and contributing $150 a month to Communist causes.

  He issued a statement: “I have never contributed money to a political organization of any form. That includes Republican, Democratic, Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, or the Communist Party. Furthermore, I have never attended the school mentioned nor do I know what school that may be. I dare the men who are attempting this investigation to call me to the stand. I want to face them myself and not by a proxy to whom I am only a name.”

  Only the year before, a trial examiner had labeled Leech “a pathological liar.” Even so, a newspaper head proclaimed HOLLYWOOD STARS ACCUSED AS REDS BEFORE GRAND JURY.

  In a suite at the Biltmore Hotel, Bogie confronted Dies, who year round wore a piss-stained suit the color of eggnog ice cream with a red, white, and blue polka dot tie. Under extensive questioning, Dies could not find one iota of evidence that Bogie was or had ever been a Communist.

  After the meeting, the Dies Committee exonerated Bogie, claiming that he was a patriotic American. However, unlike the front-page accusations, that item appeared on page 18 of the Los Angeles Times. The report stated that “the link of one Mr. Humphrey Bogart to the Communist Party does not appear to be founded in fact.”

  All this did not escape the attention of Jack Warner. He was set to give Bogie star billing in his most important picture to date, High Sierra. At the last minute, he called his publicity department. “On all the posters, make it IDA LUPINO AND HUMPHREY BOGART STARRING IN HIGH SIERRA.”

  ***

  During the closing months of 1940, Maud Bogart was battling cancer at the age of seventy-two. On November 23, she lost the battle.

  Methot called Bogie at the studio, telling him that his mother was dead.

  Since she moved to her small studio on Sunset Boulevard, she still hadn’t become intimate with her son, but they had come to respect and admire each other.

  He would later regret that they had not developed a more intimate relationship. He also regretted that she did not live to see him ascend to become the major star on the Warners lot. “When she died,” he told Methot, “I was still playing third or fourth leads in crappy movies.” She never lived to see me in High Sierra.”

  That landmark movie opened in January of 1941, weeks after her burial.

&n
bsp; Methot, who remained close to Maud, even though fighting with her son, handled the funeral arrangements. She was interred at Forest Lawn, which would see the burial of Bogie himself in the 1950s.

  He cried as Maud was buried. All he could manage to say was, “She died as she had lived. With guts!”

  ***

  After High Sierra, Bogie expected Jack Warner to offer him the best scripts floating around the studio. To his disappointment, he was presented with Carnival, which seemed to be a cheap rip-off of Kid Galahad. The boxing ring of Kid Galahad had been changed to a circus setting.

  Instead of a top-notch director, Bogie was assigned Ray Enright, the same guy who’d directed him in one of his worst movies, Swing Your Lady.

  Amazingly, the sluggish director had assembled a first-rate cast. Bogie would co-star with Sylvia Sidney with whom he’d appeared in Dead End in 1937. Joan Leslie was once again appearing with him, as was a charming and very talented young actor, Eddie Albert.

  Bogie sarcastically told the director, “Great script. Instead of getting mowed down by Edward G. Robinson, I get killed by an insane lion in the final reel.”

  “All in a day’s work,” Enright said.

  To add to his humiliation of starring in Carnival, Bogie was “the sloppy second” choice [his words]. Hal Wallis had at first offered the role to George Raft. Usually Raft was a poor judge of scripts, but not this time. He rejected it, but did not do so in a diplomatic way. “Go fuck yourself,” he notified Warners.

  Before going into general release, the film’s original title, Carnival, was changed to The Wagons Roll at Night. The plot called for Bogie to play a traveling carnival owner Nick Coster, with Sidney as his girlfriend, Flo Lorraine. Eddie Albert played a lion tamer, Matt Varney, who falls for Nick’s sister, Joan Leslie, cast as Mary Coster.