Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Bogie is the definite loser in this film, and it did nothing to establish him as the romantic hero he was about to become. Not only does his girlfriend, Sidney, fall for Albert, but so does his sister, Joan Leslie.

  Bogie hated the film and did not want to see the final cut. He did encounter a fan while he was buying a new suit at a men’s store on Hollywood Boulevard. “I didn’t think you were that bad,” the salesman told him.

  Many articles have claimed that The Wagons Roll at Night was the first film in which Bogie got first billing. Actually, he’d had top billing in such 1930s features as Racket Busters, King of the Underworld, and You Can’t Get Away With Murder.

  On a trip with Methot to New York, “the battlers” had seen Irwin Shaw’s hit play, The Gentle People. Bogie had gone backstage to chat with its star, Sylvia Sidney, who had gotten the best notices for The Wagons Roll at Night.

  Franchot Tone, trying to escape the label of “Mr. Joan Crawford,” was cast as the male lead, Geoff, a waterfront extortionist who is the terror of his neighborhood.

  After the show, Bogie told Methot that he was “itching” to play the role in the screen version. He personally telegraphed Hal Wallis that he wanted the part.

  Upon his return to Hollywood, he learned that Wallis was going to cast James Cagney. Cagney balked, and, once again, so did George Raft, who completely rejected the script.

  Anatole Litvak, its director, pleaded with both Raft and Cagney to change their minds, but each of the actors adamantly refused. In desperation, Litvak turned to Edward G. Robinson, who in one afternoon read the script and immediately turned it down.

  Bypassing Wallis at this point, Bogie shot off a telegram to the boss man himself, Jack Warner. IT SEEMS TO ME THAT I AM THE LOGICAL PERSON ON THE LOT TO PLAY GENTLE PEOPLE. I WOULD BE GREATLY DISAPPOINTED IF I DIDN’T GET IT.

  While in New York, Hal Wallis received a telegram from the coast. Ida Lupino had been cast as the female lead with script approval and arguably approval of her choice of leading man as well. Wallis read the wire. LUPINO REFUSES TO PLAY IN PICTURE WITH BOGART.

  In later years Lupino denied that she had refused to work with Bogie. “We parted on the friendliest of terms,” the actress claimed. “Hal Wallis, and perhaps Jack Warner, just did not want Bogie in the role. But they blamed me. Both of them preferred John Garfield. Even when Bogie was trying to get the role, the department had come up with what they thought was a novel idea. They were going to promote John and me as a new screen team. That never happened, of course. Ironically, pictures originally intended for John and me, such as To Have and Have Not or Key Largo, went to Bogie and his& new bride, Lauren Bacall.”

  One morning over Methot’s too black coffee, Bogie picked up a trade paper. The headline read: BOGART OUT, GARFIELD IN.

  Bogie took a small delight when The Gentle People —its title by now changed to Out of the Fog —opened to mixed reviews and dwindling box office returns.

  He was out of work for only two weeks, most of which he spent battling with Methot, when the studio told him they were putting him back to work in Manpower, the latest George Raft movie. Each of them would play a power lineman vying for the affections of Marlene Dietrich, who had been lent to Jack Warner in a deal with Universal.

  The powers behind the movie were well known to Bogie—Raoul Walsh as director, Mark Hellinger as producer. He’d also known Dietrich, but hadn’t seen her in years.

  When he read the script, he realized that it was a rip-off of Howard Hawks’ 1932 film Tiger Shark, in which Edward G. Robinson had played a Portuguese fisherman.

  Raft’s bitterness and jealousy toward Bogie reached a boiling point on the set of Manpower. He even called Bogie’s agent, Sam Jaffe, telling him “the role is completely absurd for your client. If he continues in this picture, it will ruin his career.” Raft complained daily to Walsh and to the co-stars, including Dietrich.

  Finally, Raft stormed into Jack Warner’s office and told him bluntly: “I will walk off the lot today if Bogart stays in the picture.”

  After an hour of cajoling, pleading, and threatening, Raft got his wish. “I’ll tell Walsh to fire Bogart this afternoon,” Warner claimed. “Eddie is free.”

  He was, of course, referring to Raft’s other rival, Edward G. Robinson.

  Walsh went along with orders, but told Warner, “Your boy Raft is really stupid. He was offered Manpower last year when the script was called Danger Zone. He turned that down. The fucker doesn’t know it’s the same damn script.”

  Before leaving the set, Bogie called on Dietrich in her dressing room for a final adieu. She stood at the door and didn’t let him in, as she was obviously entertaining someone. Was it George Raft himself? “I’m sorry you didn’t stay longer,” she whispered. “We could have gotten together and shared our goodies.” She gave him a wet-lipped kiss and then shut the door. He heard a man’s voice calling to her.

  In the second week of the shoot, Raft was so furious at Robinson he asked Walsh if he would hire Bogie back. He and Robinson clashed every day. Not only were they vying for top gun on the screen, but battling offscreen for the affections of Dietrich. At one point they were caught by a Life magazine photographer punching each other out. After Manpower wrapped with a minimum of violence, Robinson wouldn’t speak to Raft for the next fourteen years.

  As Bogie was being laughed off the screen for his performance in The Wagons Roll at Night, he received an unexpected call from his new friend, John Huston. “My dream has come true. I’m going to direct a picture, and I want you to star in it.”

  “What character do I play?”

  “You play a private detective named Sam Spade. It’s based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett.”

  “What’s this stinker about?”

  “Well, it’s about a bird.”

  “That sounds okay with me,” Bogie said. “A bird I can handle. In my last picture, I got bumped off by a lion.”

  “My picture is called The Maltese Falcon,” Huston said.

  “Are you recycling that old Bette Davis movie, Satan Met A Lady ?”

  “Indeed I am, but with a different twist,” Huston said. “This is serious drama. Actually Ricardo Cortez was the first Sam Spade back in those bad old Depression days of 1931.”

  “Listen, I need a hit,” Bogie said, “I can’t keep appearing in all this recycled crap.”

  “Perhaps, you’ll change your mind when I tell you who your leading lady in The Maltese Falcon is going to be. Miss Ingrid Bergman, late of Sweden.”

  Bogie paused for a long moment. “Ingrid Bergman. Leslie Howard told me a lot about her. Ingrid Bergman, you say. OK, I’ll star in your fucking picture.”

  ***

  There are various stories as to what caused Methot to stab Bogie with a butcher knife in their kitchen.

  John Huston later claimed that Bogie told him the true story, or at least his version of what happened one night when Methot and her spouse were sitting in their living room drinking. At first, the talk was about politics. Bogie was a Roosevelt Democrat but Methot was politically conservative.

  As related by Bogie, the evening got off to a bad start when Bogie suggested that Ingrid Berman “is the only true lady in Hollywood.” They had just returned from seeing Bergman play a French governess in Adam Had Four Sons.

  “Well, what do you think I am?” a drunken Methot asked.

  “You did play a prostitute in Marked Woman,” he said. “Type casting.”

  Within moments she’d gone to the bar and picked up a whiskey bottle, bashing it into his skull.

  Getting up from the sofa bleeding and with a splitting headache, he made his way to the kitchen to get an ice pack.

  Furious at her, he called back. “Jack Warner called me in the other day. He said with the release of High Sierra, I’m gonna be a big star, and I can no longer be seen around town with a blousy matron long past her peak—that is, if she ever had a peak. He said I need to have a young, beautiful wife more appropriate to my new status
as a star. Someone like Ingrid Bergman or Ida Lupino.”

  Methot came into the kitchen and picked up a butcher knife. In a fit of madness she lunged toward him. Seeing her coming, he ducked. Instead of his heart, she missed, stabbing him in his back.

  Bleeding profusely, he ran out the door and called on a neighbor in a house nearby. An ambulance was summoned, and he was taken to a hospital. As it turned out it was only a flesh wound but had bled so much it seemed more serious.

  Unless Bogie was putting on Huston, he claimed that after he left the hospital he went to a nightclub and later spent the night in a Turkish bath.

  He enjoyed seeing the state Methot was in when he took a taxi home the next morning. She had not slept all night and had been frantically calling all over Hollywood to locate her husband.

  “She was a model wife for forty-eight hours,” Bogie told Huston.

  The following Sunday night, Bogie invited Methot to La Maze for dinner and drinks, lots of drinks. He was usually more modest, but as of late he preferred to believe the press generated by High Sierra, not The Wagons Roll at Night.

  “You know what, your old man is going to become the new idol of American women,” he told her. “All the hot tamales will be shaking it at me, telling me to climb up for the wildest ride of my life. I’m gonna be bigger than George Raft and Edward G. Robinson. The dames will adore me. You should read my fan mail. Half the women of America, or so it seems, are begging me to fuck them. I’m adored by my public.”

  “You fucking ham actor,” she shouted at him, throwing her glass, filled with alcohol, in his face. She raced toward the door and started down the street. One of her high heels came off, and she stumbled, falling drunk onto the sidewalk. She managed to pick herself up and stepped off the curb, hoping to summon one of the cabs that lined up in front of nightclubs in those days.

  In the meantime, Bogie, who had driven to the restaurant, summoned the valet to get his car, even though he was in no condition to drive. Behind the wheel, he headed down the street. Spotting Methot, he stepped on the accelerator, and the car lunged toward her.

  As he later told Huston, “I think I wanted to kill her at that moment. If ever I were psychotic in my whole life, that was it. I was heading right toward her. But at the last minute, I swerved and narrowly missed her, although I felt my car sideswiped her body. I braked but the pavement was wet and I skidded right into a parked car.”

  Both Methot and Bogie spent the night in the same hospital room. A policeman came to investigate. Fortunately, he was a fan of Bogie’s, and no charges were filed.

  “As you know, I once made a movie called San Quentin,” Bogie told Huston. “Had I not swerved that night, I would have ended up in that prison. And if I hadn’t seen Mayo coming at me with that knife, she’d be in prison too, and I’d be lying next to Maud at Forest Lawn.”

  “Kid, my advice to you is to file for a divorce from this bitch,” Huston said. “She brings out the worst in you. I want to become a director, and I want you to star in my biggest films. That can’t happen if you’re dead. I know you rose from the dead in The Return of Doctor X. But we’re talking real life here. Divorce her! You’re going to sooner than later. Why not now? Don’t postpone it—or it may be too late.”

  “You’re right!” Bogie said. “I’m gonna go home tonight and kick the bitch out of my house.”

  That was a promise he’d keep, but not right away. Even more spectacular wars would be raged between “The Battling Bogarts” before the final curtain.

  ***

  Huston later recalled that, “I got one of the most disappointing calls of my life when Jack Warner told me that he was going to offer the part of Sam Spade to George Raft. I had to call Bogie and tell him he was off the picture. No Ingrid Bergman. No Bogie.”

  Since Huston didn’t want Raft anyway, he was delighted when he turned down the role. He called Bogie right away with the news.

  By now Bogie felt he was a star and, although he wanted the part of Sam Spade, he regretted that he was still second choice—“still a sloppy second,” he told Huston.

  Raft had told Jack Warner that he did not think the movie “would be an important picture.” He exercised a clause in his contract that stated that he did not have to work on remakes.

  He also objected to Huston. “I’m too nervous to entrust my career to a director’s first assignment, this young John Huston. He’s far too inexperienced to direct me.”

  After Raft turned down The Maltese Falcon, “Warner began to see him as a jerk,” according to Huston.

  Bogie heard that the studio owed Raft $75,000 but that Raft nonetheless bought out his contract for $10,000 “just to get the hell off that Warners’ lot.”

  Warner told friends he “practically ran to the bank to cash the check before Raft changed his mind.”

  The long battle for roles between Raft and Bogie had at last come to an inglorious ending.

  In the aftermath of the Bogart vs. Raft conflicts, Raft would make only one more movie for Warner Brothers, Background to Danger (1943), in which he was directed by Raoul Walsh with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet as his co-stars.

  Background to Danger, ironically, was conceived as a spin-off of Casablanca. Because of the spectacular success of Casablanca, every studio in Hollywood was trying to duplicate its ambience.

  ***

  Bogie came off a two-month suspension to appear as the lead in Huston’s Maltese Falcon. He’d refused to do Bad Men of Missouri, which was rare for him, as in the 1930s he’d more or less done what Jack Warner told him to.

  Bogie’s intended role in Bad Men of Missouri went to fast-rising Dennis Morgan, who vowed that he’d never take a part away from Bogie.

  When Bette Davis ran into Bogie on the Warner lot, she’d already read that he’d be starring in The Maltese Falcon. “That tired old thing,” she said provocatively. “You tell everybody you don’t want to take Raft’s sloppy seconds. Now you’re taking mine.”

  Released in 1931, The Maltese Falcon, the original version, had starred Bebe Daniels with Ricardo Cortez cast as the detective. In the first version, Cortez played it much more as a ladies’ man than Bogart in his version of 1941.

  Davis was referring to her failed film, Satan Met a Lady, which was the second recycling of The Maltese Falcon. In 1936, she starred in the most unsuccessful adaptation of the drama, appearing in the Brigid role opposite Warren William. Within the Davis movie, detective Sam Spade had been turned into a lawyer.

  Bogie was very disappointed to learn that Ingrid Bergman had only been considered, and that no firm offer had ever been extended to her.

  “I will give you the world’s greatest consolation prize?” Huston said. “

  Who dat ?” Bogie asked. “Marjorie Main?”

  “No, Rita Hayworth.”

  “That’s great, pal,” Bogie said. “If her father has stopped fucking her, maybe Rita will share some of her goodies with me. Send her on.”

  Before Bergman or Hayworth were considered for the role of the female lead, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, it had originally been pitched to 27-year-old Geraldine Fitzgerald, with whom both Bogie and Bette Davis had worked in Dark Victory. Wanting to play sympathetic parts, she turned it down. “Let Bette do those bitch roles,” she said.

  Huston then had to call Bogie with more bad news about the female lead. “Rita Hayworth is off the picture. But, get this, how about Olivia de Havilland?”

  “First you give me Raft’s sloppy seconds,” Bogie protested. “Now you offer Errol Flynn’s sloppy seconds.”

  Finally, a contract for the female lead was finally signed, with Mary Astor, whom Bogie knew only slightly, having performed a radio drama with her.

  Originally a child star, Astor had had a checkered past. As a teenager she’d been seduced by John Barrymore, and she’d even had an affair with Walter Huston during the filming of Dodsworth (1936). “She went first for the father, then for the son,” Bogie said.

  Her first husband, Kenneth Haw
ks, the brother of Howard Hawks, had died in a plane crash.

  During her divorce from her second husband, Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, in 1935, her scandalous diary was entered into evidence in the custody fight for their daughter, four-year-old Marylyn Thorpe.

  Among other revelations, it included juicy insights into her notorious affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. She confessed that the playwright was “the kind of man I’d go over a cliff for.”

  The diary also revealed her struggle with alcoholism and her various suicide attempts.

  Usually, off-screen notoriety would be a detriment to a star’s career. But in Astor’s case, Huston hired her for the role because of her adulterous reputation. Astor described her role of Brigid as a “bitch cauldron” and a psychopathic personality.

  “I’m a director at last,” Huston said, rushing to embrace Bogie when he showed up on the set of The Maltese Falcon. “It sure beats sleeping on park benches in Hyde Park when I was a struggling scriptwriter in London. To keep from starving, I even sang cowboy songs to people waiting in line to get into the theater.”

  It was Bogie who welcomed Walter Huston, John’s father, to the set. As a good luck gesture in honor of his son’s debut as a director, Walter had agreed to appear in an uncredited cameo. John had promised Jack Warner, a tightwad, that he would not charge Warners for his father’s appearance.

  In his cameo, Walter, a sea captain sieved with bullet holes, appears in Spade’s office. Mumbling a word or two, he delivers the falcon before falling dead.

  During the first week of the shoot, Huston came to Bogie. “Let’s talk man to man, kid,” he told his star. “During the filming, Mary Astor is off limits to you. I’m taking director’s privilege, and I’m the one who fucks the female star.”

  “That’s okay with me, pal” Bogie said. “I don’t want to end up in some sex diary.”

  Bogie had several talks with Astor on the set. In spite of her scandalous life, he found her a sensitive, caring woman. He confided to her that he “hated the marriage trap.”