Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  “I don’t like to be used, the feeling that another human being possesses me, that I always have to buckle down, turning out all those crap pictures to bring home the bacon.”

  When Astor, years later, heard about his upcoming marriage to Lauren Bacall, she approved completely. “The remarkable Bacall knew who he was and let him be who he was and what he was. In return, he was at last able to give something no other woman could grab from him— certainly not Mayo Methot or Mary Philips—and that was his total commitment.”

  In recalling her work with Bogie on Falcon, Astor said, “He wasn’t very tall; vocally he had a range from A to B; his eyes were like shiny coal nuggets pressed deep into his skull, and his smile was a mistake that he tried to keep from happening. He was no movie hero. He was no hero at all.”

  ***

  Bogie had fond memories of making The Maltese Falcon, and either was a friend or became a friend of some of the supporting players.

  On the set, he invited “two of my all-time favorite” broads—Lee Patrick and Gladys George—to his dressing room for drinks. Patrick, a former girlfriend from the 20s, was cast as Effie Perine, the loyal, quick-thinking secretary of Sam Spade. This small role became one of her most enduring film characterizations. Patrick had been called in at the last minute. Eve Arden had been the first choice for the role of the secretary.

  Years later, Patrick’s final acting role was a reprise of the Effie Perine character she developed for The Maltese Falcon. In a reworking of the Sam Spade story, The Black Bird (1975) starred George Segal as Sam Spade Jr. In that movie, he was forced to continue his father’s work and to retain his father’s increasingly sarcastic secretary.

  Gladys George, who had worked with Bogie before in The Roaring Twenties, received third billing, even though she played a relatively minor role. In The Maltese Falcon she was cast as Iva Archer, the faithless wife of Spade’s partner, Miles Archer. The role became her most remembered.

  According to Huston, Jerome Cowan was perfectly cast as Miles Archer, Sam Spade’s sleazy partner.

  In The Maltese Falcon, Bogie would be forever linked in the public’s mind to two of his supporting players, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet.

  Working with Lorre on the set of The Maltese Falcon marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Bogie and the Hungarian-born actor, who had made a name for himself in the German theater before fleeing to America to escape the Nazis. Lorre was known as Warner’s “resident pervert with an accent.”

  Like Belmont Bogart, Lorre was a morphine addict, having developed his addiction in the wake of a horrendously painful gallbladder operation during the late 1920s. He first achieved fame as the psychotic child murderer in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).

  Lorre and Bogie became “close pals,” in Bogie’s words and would work in four more films together, not only the memorable Casablanca but the controversial Beat the Devil.

  Lorre, incidentally, became the friend who would urge Bogie to marry Lauren Bacall in spite of the vast difference in their ages. “Five good years are better than none,” he told Bogie.

  The Maltese Falcon marked the first pairing of Lorre and Greenstreet, who would go on to make nine more movies together. “They became more famous as a couple than Romeo and Juliet,” said Huston.

  “I will always remember Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet moving through some fog-laden street on the back lot of Warners,” Huston said. “You could be sure that both of them were up to some heinous deed. I’d call them the Laurel and Hardy of crime. Even though they appeared in many films without each other, they are forever married as a pair of disreputable but fascinating evil-doers that won a place in our hearts forever. They may, in fact, become immortal long after we’ve forgotten Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth.”

  From the start, Lorre was Huston’s first choice to play the role of Joel Cairo. “You will know that you’re playing a homosexual,” Huston said. “I will know that, and Bogie will know that. But according to the Production Code, we’re not supposed to depict homosexuals openly on the screen. Those blue noses think that sucking cock or taking it up the ass isn’t what men should do. So let’s keep it our little secret, okay?”

  Lorre defiantly played the role of Cairo as effeminate. In the movie, both his calling cards and handkerchiefs are scented with gardenias; he fusses about his wardrobe, and becomes hysterical when blood from a scratch spoils his shirt. He also virtually fellates his cane during an interview with Sam Spade.

  In Hammett’s novel, the character is more blatantly homosexual, and is called “queer” and “the fairy.”

  Greenstreet made his first on-screen appearance as Casper Gutman or “The Fat Man” in this picture. The 357-pound, 60-year-old British actor would forever be associated with Bogie’s screen image.

  The scene where Greenstreet tries to get Bogie to take a drink which is drugged was the performer’s first appearance in front of a Hollywood camera.

  Greenstreet fit Hammett’s description—“flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chin and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso.”

  Before making his first appearance on camera, Greenstreet turned to Astor, “Mary, dear, hold my hand; tell me I won’t make an ass of myself!”

  During his previous forty years, Greenstreet had been a prominent stage actor. Two decades Bogie’s senior, Greenstreet had once been a tea planter in Ceylon before going on what he still called “the wicked, wicked stage” in London.

  Suffering from diabetes and Bright’s disease, Greenstreet made films for a period of only eight years, but he is among the best remembered and the most recognizable of all film actors. Greenstreet’s film career ended not in a Bogie movie but in Malaya (1949), in which he had third billing after Spencer Tracy and James Stewart.

  Lorre wasn’t the only actor evoking a homosexual in the film. Elisha Cook Jr., who had appeared on Broadway with Bogie in the 1932 Chrysalis, was cast as the punk, Wilmer Cook.

  In the movie, Sam Spade refers to Wilmer as a “gunsel.” The censors thought that meant a gunman. The Yiddish term gunsel, literally “little goose,” was a vulgarism for a homosexual, similar to the Yiddish word “faigle” or “little bird.” Gunsel usually meant a young man involved in a homosexual relationship with an older man.

  Cook later claimed, “I was forever cast as a pimp, an informer, or a cocksucker.”

  The characters of Casper Gutman (Greenstreet) and Wilmer (Cook) were referred to in the Falcon film as “Fat Man” and “Little Boy.” These were the names used for the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in

  1945, ending World War II.

  ***

  Arguably, The Maltese Falcon included more scenes wherein its principal actors smoked cigarettes onscreen than any film of the 1940s, surpassing even movies made by Bette Davis. Jack Warner hated to see actors smoke on the screen, claiming it would prompt smokers in the audience to leave their seats and walk out into the lobby to light up.

  But the excessive smoking in Falcon actually contributed to the atmospheric tension of the convoluted story.

  Jack Warner wanted to entitle the movie The Gent from Frisco because The Maltese Falcon had been the name of the 1931 version. But Huston insisted that the original title be used, and he eventually won the battle.

  In thirty-four days, Huston ushered the filming of The Maltese Falcon (1941) to completion, one of the world’s most classic films. If High Sierra didn’t quite put Bogie on the A-list in Hollywood, The Maltese Falcon did the trick.

  “Bogie was a second-class star who then became a big star after The Maltese Falcon,” Huston said.

  Or as Otto Friedrich claimed, “Bogie was released from his gangster roles and won audiences over by playing a good guy anti-hero. The Maltese Falcon was the movie in which he created the persona that not only made him famous for the rest of his life but gradually became his own permanent identity.”

  The climatic confrontation in the movie lasted
for almost twenty minutes, taking up one-fifth of the 100-minute running time. All five principal stars were on camera, the shoot taking an entire week with a day off to celebrate July 4.

  The closing line, “The stuff that dreams are made of,” was voted as the 14th most famous piece of movie dialogue of all time by the American Film Institute. It was Bogie who suggested that Huston use this paraphrase of a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  In 2007, the American Film Institute also ranked The Maltese Falcon as #31 among The Greatest Movies of All Time.

  On May 18, 1950, the Screen Guild Theatre broadcast a thirty-minute radio adaptation of the movie, with Bogie as Sam Spade. His fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, performed the Mary Astor role.

  After The Maltese Falcon, Huston would have only admiration for Bogie as an actor. “There was a devil in the kid, and Bogie made audiences aware of his demons. The devils were so obvious that it was like unzipping your pants and putting your dick on public display. When Bogie was uncaged, he was one of the most exciting creatures in the history of movies.”

  Bogie’s acceptance of Huston as a director and his acceptance of the role of Sam Spade consolidated their life-long friendship and set the stage for collaboration on such later films as The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), and Beat the Devil (1954).

  The Maltese Falcon was nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 1941, but lost to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley.

  When he saw the finished cut, Bogie proclaimed, “I’ll no longer have to be a punching bag for guys like Cagney, Robinson, and Raft. The world is starting to discover what drives Mayo Methot crazy—and that is Humphrey Bogart has sex appeal. I’ve been denied love in nearly all my films. It’s time from now on that I get the gal in future movies. Old guys like me need love, too.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bogie was always getting a call, either from another actor or a director, which indirectly transmitted details about his next starring role. Jack Warner or Hal Wallis never contacted him personally, the way they did with George Raft.

  The last time he’d seen the producer, Wallis, Bogie had reminded him, “I’m the new George Raft. Let’s not forget that when assigning roles in the future. When did Raft last deliver a hit like The Maltese Falcon ?” He paused a few seconds. “You don’t have to answer that.”

  This time around, it was director Vincent Sherman who called to tell Bogie he’d been cast in All Through the Night (1942) to be produced by Jerry Wald.

  “Who are my co-stars?” Bogie asked.

  “Conrad Veidt and Kaaren Verne,” Sherman said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. “With a war nearly upon us, you put me in a film with Krauts. Don’t you know there’s anti-German sentiment out there? Who else?”

  Listen, I had to settle for Verne,” Sherman told Bogie. “I really wanted David Selznick’s new discovery, Ingrid Bergman, but she wasn’t available. At one point Warner wanted Olivia de Havilland.”

  “John Huston has his eye on De Havilland, so she’s off-limits to me,” Bogie said. “No use spoiling a great friendship. But that Swedish icicle, the Bergman dame. I bet I could melt her down.”

  “In addition to the leads, we’ve got an amazing supporting cast,” Sherman claimed. “Some of the best supporting talent in Hollywood. Your new friend, Peter Lorre. But also Jane Darwell. She was marvelous in Grapes of Wrath. Frank McHugh. Barton MacLane. Wallace Ford. Phil Silvers. Jackie Gleason, William Demarest. Fucking comics they give me. And, for the lezzies, Judith Anderson.”

  “What’s my character called?”

  “Gloves Donahue, a bigshot Broadway gambler.”

  “Gloves?” Bogie asked. “What about Mittens?”

  “Listen, the picture is all about Nazi agents,” Sherman said. “It’s very timely and all. Part of the film involves a Nazi attempt to blow up the Brooklyn Navy Yard. You’re not going to bolt, are you?”

  “I’ll do the goddamn picture, providing you sign a blood oath that you didn’t offer it to Raft first.”

  Unhappy with the script of All Through the Night, Bogie placed a private call to Irene Lee, the West Coast story editor for Warner Brothers. Contract players weren’t supposed to do that, but Bogie said, “What the hell!”

  “What’s the hottest property you’ve got cooking on the stove?” he asked Lee, who was a fan of his.

  “I’ve read a copy of this play that never got produced,” Lee said. “It’s called Everybody Comes to Rick’s. It’s set in Morocco. I sent it to Wallis, and he liked it. But he didn’t like the title, though. Algiers was such a big hit that he wants to call it Casablanca. The lead role, Rick, owns a bar. There’s this gal. They met in Paris.”

  “Could I play Rick?”

  “The role was made for you,” Lee said. “But there’s a problem. Wallis and Jack Warner see George Raft doing it.”

  “See you, kid,” Bogie put down the phone.

  By now, Bogie was openly telling anyone who wanted to listen, “Raft is a complete asshole. The day is coming, and it’s coming very soon, when Raft will be taking my sloppy seconds. Mark my words.”

  Peter Lorre called Bogie to meet him for drinks at Romanoff’s, where he was introduced to his female lead, Kaaren Verne. This Berlin-born actress had fled the Nazis in 1938. Bogie had never heard of her, and she explained why.

  “The studio changed my name to Catherine Young,” she said. “But since& Jack Warner thinks war with Hitler is inevitable, he told me to call myself Kaaren Verne again. He thinks there’s publicity to be gained by a Teutonic actress who turned her back on Hitler and fled to America.”

  Before the second drink, Bogie had decided that Verne and Lorre had fallen in love. It didn’t seem to matter that Verne was married to musician Arthur Young, and Lorre had wed Celia Lovsky in 1934.

  Ever his provocative self, Bogie, now into his fourth martini, asked Verne, “What does a dame like you, a member of the superior race, want with this little Jew gnome?”

  “There’s more to Peter than meets the eye,” she said.

  “I hope so,” Bogie said. “Judged from the outside package, he looks like a shrimp.”

  The affair between Lorre and Verne began during the making of All Through the Night, but neither of them would divorce their spouses until 1945, at which time they married each other.

  Verne had played the lead for Vincent Sherman in Underground (1941), and they worked well together. “Finally,” Sherman told Bogie, “you get the girl but only on screen. Our little Jew boy [a reference to Lorre] is pounding that Kraut pussy every afternoon in his dressing room before she goes home to hubbie.”

  Meeting Jane Darwell, Bogie virtually fell into her bosom. “You’re my mommy on screen but I want you to be my mommy off screen too. I’m a new orphan, and I need my mommy.”

  “You can place that lovely head of yours in my bosom any night you want,” Darwell told him.

  Bogie’s first greeting to Gleason was, “You look like the man who came to dinner and ate the guests.”

  On the first day of the shoot, Sherman complained to Bogie that Warner was giving him only $300 a week to direct the picture with a budget of $600,000. “Other directors are getting so much more.”

  “Maybe you just ain’t worth it,” Bogie said just to rile him.

  Bogie fitted easily into his role as a Damon Runyon New York type who has to outwit a ruthless pack of Nazi sympathizers.

  All Through the Night was one of the first anti-Nazi films. Once war against Germany was declared, Hollywood began turning out such pictures by the hundreds.

  Sherman explained to Bogie that he was forced& to use “this fat guy,” Jackie Gleason, because he was pulling in $250 a week, and Warners had no role for him. The same problem was faced by Phil Silvers. Since there was no work for them at Warners, the studio let them both go soon after they’d appeared in All Through the Night. As comics in the years ahead, Gleason and Silvers, of course, became household names.

  Both
Sherman and Bogie had seen Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr.& Caligari, as had most of tout Hollywood.

  In the film, Veidt delivered his usual “iron-fist-in-velvet glove” performance as a Nazi agent.

  He told Bogie, “With America about to enter the war, I think I have a whole new career ahead of me in playing dreaded Nazis. Actually, I fled the Nazis. My wife is Jewish.” By that time Bogie was calling Veidt “Connie.”

  He was accurate in his prediction. Predating Casablanca, Veidt’s next film was entitled Nazi Agent.

  Over drinks, Veidt told Bogie that there was another reason to leave Germany. “I was known as a staunch anti-Nazi,” he said. “As such, I attracted the scrutiny of the Gestapo. A decision was made to assassinate me. I found out about the plot in time. I was able to escape from Germany before the Nazi death squad got to me.”

  One drunken night when Veidt had had too many beers, he asked Bogie if he could sing a song in his ear. Very quietly he sang “Where the Lighthouse Shines Across the Bay.”

  “It was the song I sang in my last German film F.P.I. in 1933,” Veidt said. “My record was a flop.”

  “Yeah, my songs haven’t been hits either,” Bogie said jokingly.

  Ironically Veidt’s song became a hit in England fifty years later when it was discovered by disc jockey Terry Wogan.

  Filming of All Through the Night went smoothly except on six different occasions when Mayo Methot showed up. She suspected that Bogie was having an affair with Kaaren Verne.

  On the set of Veidt’s previous picture, Above Suspicion, he had told Joan Crawford, “When I made All Through the Night with Bogie, I was shocked at the fighting that went on between him and his wife, Methot. I heard screaming one afternoon, and I opened the door to my dressing room in time to see Bogie chasing Methot across the sound stage. At the top of his voice, he was screaming, ‘You dirty bitch! You filthy bitch! I’m gonna kill you, you broken-down old hag.’”