Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

“I went to Sherman to see what was going on,” Veidt said. “He told me, ‘Get used to it. One day, sooner than later, one of them is going to kill the other. I hope it’s Methot who bites the dust. I need Bogie.’”

  All Through the Night came under fire from isolationists, but Warner and Bogie, too, did not back down. Bogie’s response to such isolationists as Senator Gerald Nye was, “Go stick a fat dildo up your crusty ass.” Senator Bennett C. Clark charged Bogie with “creating war hysteria with such anti-German propaganda movies.”

  At long last Bogie and Jack Warner were united in a common cause, fighting censorship and undue influence from Washington politicians who wanted to silence them.

  Warner denounced isolationists, claiming, “I may be charged with being anti-Nazi, but no son of a bitch is going to call me anti-American.”

  Bogie chimed in, telling the Hollywood Reporter that censorship “is the number one enemy of a free democracy. Let Josef Goebbels stay where he is in Berlin, licking the dingleberries off Hitler’s asshole.” The first part of his statement was printed, the second part was censored.

  Bogie was not a joiner. But he did join the Fight for Freedom Committee, urging the entry of the United States into World War II.

  He knew that an attack of some sort on American soil was imminent. He volunteered his thirty-eight foot, diesel-powered Sluggy for the war effort.

  Southern California, with all its defense plants and refineries, was vulnerable to attack. After qualifying for the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, he piloted his Sluggy along the coastline one weekend, looking for enemy ships. Larger vessels had already been called up by the U.S. Navy.

  All Through the Night was wrapped around the middle of October in 1941.

  Ironically in the weeks preceding December 7, 1941, Warners was developing an action thriller for Bogie called Aloha Means Goodbye, involving a Japanese plot to attack military installations in Hawaii. It had been serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.

  Bogie was due December 10 in St. Louis to appear at a Fight for Freedom rally with Melvyn Douglas and his politician wife, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Linda Darnell, a rising film star, was also slated to appear with Bogie and Mr. and Mrs. Douglas, whose career would later be ruined by a Red-baiting young politician named Richard M. Nixon.

  All plans were cancelled on December 7. Peter Lorre telephoned Bogie so that he’d switch on a radio for news about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  In January of 1942, All Through the Night opened across the country and did better business than The Maltese Falcon. By then both Franklin Roosevelt and the Congress had declared war against both Germany and Japan.

  There were no more protests against Warner Brothers for its anti-Nazi films. The America First organization, which had opposed the entry of the United States into World War II, had become history once Pearl Harbor was attacked.

  Bogie specifically requested that Jack Warner star him in more anti-Nazi films.

  He made another call to see how that play Everybody Comes to Rick’s — tentatively entitled Casablanca —was coming along.

  In the meantime, Sam Jaffe negotiated a new contract for Bogie with Warners, a seven-year deal at $1,750 a week.

  He had high hopes for his wartime future in films. Having already served in the military during the closing days of World War I, he was too old for the draft.

  Expecting bigger and better pictures, he was immediately disappointed when he learned that the leading role in The Big Shot, his next film, had been previously rejected by George Raft. “Another sloppy second,” he told his director Lewis Seiler, who had helmed him before.

  When Bogie read the script for The Big Shot (1942), he interpreted it as just another aging gangster clinker. He told director Seiler that, “I thought we stopped making crap like this in the 30s.”

  Bogie was disappointed that Mary Astor, his co-star in The Maltese Falcon, had turned down the role of the female lead.

  “I saw a secret memo that Jack Warner sent to his directors,” Astor confided to him. “After this war is over, there may be no more pictures for either one of us to turn down. That’s why I’m desperate to take only the right roles. Warner has urged his staff to find new stars. To quote him directly, he said, ‘We just cannot go on being satisfied with the old ones because each day they become more unmanageable and less box office.’”

  “What you’re really saying is for me to avoid turkeys—or else,” Bogie said.

  “Perhaps we’ll work again some day,” she said.

  “Maybe in Grandpa and Grandma roles,” he said, before ringing off.

  During the shoot of The Big Shot, Bogie was sleeping with Methot only on special occasions, whatever that was. He was looking to begin an affair. For a while he settled on his female co-star, the beautiful, sultry Irene Manning, an actress-singer from Cincinnati.

  He recognized her from her appearance in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), as Bogie never missed a James Cagney movie. “I need to see what the drag queen is up to,” he told Methot.

  Manning had been around since the mid-30s, appearing with Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. She quipped, “I left light opera for horse operas.”

  Bogie may have seduced Manning—or maybe not. Neither party ever spoke of the matter. It was obvious to those on the set that he was attracted to her, but whatever there was between them was not recorded by any eyewitnesses.

  “Instead of hot love scenes with Bogie in the film, I had to take a bullet for him in the final reel,” Manning said.

  Bogie was even more attracted to the second female lead, a Spokane-born “starlet with promise,” the lovely and luminous Susan Peters.

  But he backed away when he heard this young girl was dating Howard Hughes and also getting serious with actor Richard Quine, whom she would marry in 1943.

  She’d been nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her appearance in the 1942 Random Harvest. Bogie realized that Peters was one of those stars of tomorrow that Mary Astor had been talking about.

  Bogie liked Peters and had several long talks with her between takes. He told Seiler she “treats me like a father. After all, I can’t expect a nineteen-year-old gal to fall for me.”

  Obviously Bogie wasn’t very good at prophesying his own future, as Lauren Bacall waited in the wings.

  He was very saddened to pick up a newspaper on New Year’s Day in 1945 to read that Quine and his bride, Peters, on a duck-hunting trip outside San Diego, had had an accident. Her rifle had discharged accidentally, the bullet lodging in her spine, leaving her permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

  Peters would hang on to life until October 23, 1952, when she died. She’d lost her will to live and had literally starved herself to death, having not eaten in weeks.

  ***

  Bogie was in the doldrums, his marriage to Methot all but over except for the divorce. Three or four times a week, he went to the Finlandia Baths on Sunset Boulevard. Methot became convinced that it was a brothel. She was right, at least in one aspect. It was a brothel but not filled with women.

  It was patronized by young actors, many of whom were gay. There is no evidence that Bogie ever participated in any of these gay activities going on at the baths, which in the 1950s would draw such actors as Rock Hudson.

  Methot’s ire at Bogie’s Finlandia visits grew so pronounced that one night she set their home on fire. With the aid of the studio police at Warner Brothers, the flames were put out, and there was no newspaper publicity.

  His wife’s drinking, violence, and mental instability grew worse. On several occasions, he tried to get her to seek psychiatric help. “There’s nothing wrong with me that a stiff drink and a stiff dick won’t cure.” In a bizarre touch, she went around all day and half the night humming “Embraceable You.”

  Bogie’s depression was relieved when a call came in from John Huston. “How about being in my next movie, playing a character called Rick?”

  At long last Bogie showed some excitement. “I’ve been waiting fo
r months to play Rick. Jack Warner is finally green-lighting Casablanca.”

  “Not so fast,” Huston warned him. This is a different Rick. Rick Leland. It’s a war movie. The good news is you’ll be reunited with Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet, minus Peter Lorre.

  Huston sent over the script that afternoon, and Bogie immediately recognized the screenplay by Richard Macaulay as a rewrite of Aloha Means Goodbye, which he had been up for before December 7. It involved Rick’s attempt to prevent a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Since he failed to do that, the plot was reworked to have Rick save the Panama Canal from a Japanese bomber.

  As a title, Across the Pacific had been used by Warners for a silent feature in 1926, starring Monte Blue. For his own personal amusement, Huston gave Blue a small role in the 1942 version.

  In a role originally slated for Ann Sheridan, Astor was cast as Alberta Marlow, a mysterious, sophisticated lady with whom Bogie has a light-hearted romance. Greenstreet was cast as Dr. Lorenz, an urbane spy for the Japanese.

  Not only Bogie, but Astor, Greenstreet, and Huston claimed, “We miss Peter.”

  “One afternoon Peter donned a white coat and walked through a scene in which Sydney, Bogie, and I were being served breakfast on the ship,” Astor recalled. “We didn’t know John had made the switch with the actor who was playing the waiter. Peter was behind us, so we couldn’t see him, and he served us, making tiny mistakes—holding a platter a bit too far away, just touching Sydney’s arm as he lifted a cup of coffee. Finally, he leaned down and kissed me on the back of the neck, and we all broke up.”

  Having scored a hit with The Maltese Falcon, Jack Warner was eager to repeat the success of that film. He& used not only part of the same cast—Bogie, Astor, and Greenstreet—but similar dialogue, especially that spoken between Bogie and Astor.

  Right from the beginning, Huston created a “deliberate ambiguity” in the character of Rick. Was Bogie a renegade? A gangster? Or ultimately the hero who saved the Panama Canal?

  Before filming began, Huston warned Bogie that at any minute he might have to leave the movie. He was set to be called up for active duty, as he was close to being commissioned in the signal corps.

  At the most crucial point in the film, Huston got his marching papers. In the plot, Bogie had been roped to a chair, and he was surrounded by a small army of Japanese soldiers with machine guns. There was virtually no way he could escape from that trap.

  Huston had come to a stumbling block in the script, and he couldn’t solve it. He told Bogie on the set that he’d been called up. “I’m out of here. Off to war.”

  “How in the fuck am I going to get out of this Jap trap?” Bogie asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Huston assured him. In a call to Jack Warner, Huston said. “I’m off to the Army. Bogie will know how to spring himself from that trap.”

  Bogie’s friend, Vincent Sherman, was called in to complete the picture.

  In a talk with Warner that morning, the studio chief told Sherman, “It’s not just the Army. Huston is having female trouble. His wife comes in one door, and Olivia de Havilland goes out the other. The guy sometimes doesn’t know what he’s doing. Take over for him in the morning and finish the damn picture. I’m running out of money.”

  & In the film, Bogie manages to overpower a guard and take over his machine gun station in time to shoot down a Japanese plane taking off to bomb the Panama Canal. Bogie shouts, “I’m not easily trapped.”

  When someone pointed out to Sherman that this plot development was not believable, the director shot back. “If you ask me, we were lucky to get the bastard out of there at all.”

  As one reviewer noted, “The characters in Across the Pacific never got to the Pacific, much less crossed it.”

  Long after completing her last movie with Bogie, Mary Astor reflected on the man himself.

  “I have heard people say he wasn’t really a good actor,” she said. “I don’t go along with that. It is true that his personality dominated the character he was playing—but the character gained by it. His technical skill was quite brilliant. His precision timing was no accident. He kept other actors on their toes because he listened to them, he watched, he looked at them. He never had that vague stare of a person who waits for you to finish talking, who hasn’t heard a word you said. And he was never ‘upstage center,’ acting all by himself. He was there. With you.”

  ***

  After Huston volunteered for Army duty and abruptly abandoned the film he’d been directing, there was a glitch. He was assigned an Army desk job with nothing to do. When Jack Warner heard that Huston was just waiting around for an overseas posting to the war front, he sent him the script of The Killers to work on.

  The Killers was an adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway. The film was to star two exciting new personalities, both of whom were gorgeous. They were Ava Gardner, who had became famous when she’d married Mickey Rooney, and the new sensation, muscular, strikingly handsome Burt Lancaster.

  Huston did not accept screen writing credits for The Killers because he did not want the Army to find out that he wasn’t devoting his full attention to his do-nothing job, which consisted of just waiting every day for his orders.

  One evening, after Huston had finished coaching Ava Gardner for her part in The Killers, the lady herself showed up on his doorstep. It was after midnight. He’d been having his ninth drink of& the evening on his outdoor patio, and he asked her to join him.

  “She was jaw-dropping beautiful,” Huston told Bogie. “Still with her North Carolina accent. The Tarheel farm gal has become a Hollywood goddess.”

  “Did you fuck her?” Bogie asked.

  “She seduced me. She stood in front of me and pulled off her clothes and jumped in the pool. When she emerged wet, I had a towel waiting. I don’t think I got to dry her off before we did the dirty deed.”

  Bogie was anxious to meet this goddess, and soonafter, a private dinner for three was arranged way out in the San Fernando Valley, presumably where no one in the film industry would see them.

  Bogie remembered that drunken evening, where Gardner called him “honey chil’.” He found her beguiling and wanted to take her away from Huston and have her just for himself.

  When Huston went to the men’s room, Gardner provocatively said, “I saw a picture of you and your wife. Miss Mayo Methot. Is that really your wife or your mother?”

  “You’re good, kid,” he said.

  “I’m not just good, I’m the best.”

  At the end of the evening, Gardner succulently kissed Bogie right on the lips in front of Huston. “Some day let’s make a picture together. Perhaps John will direct it.”

  “Considering how you look and how I look, I could only play your father,” Bogie said.

  ***

  Fast forward to Rome in January of 1954. Joseph L. Mankiewicz was set to film The Barefoot Contessa, based on the tumultuous life of Rita Hayworth, who had turned down the role. “Too close to home,” she said.

  Mankiewicz had cast Bogie in the lead, with Gardner playing Maria Vargas. Cast as a loud-mouthed press agent, Edmond O’Brien had the third lead, for which he would win an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.

  Bogie played the world-weary writer-director Harry Dawes. He arrived on the set with his wig maker and long-time mistress Verita Peterson. In the first weeks of the shoot, Lauren Bacall had not yet arrived in Rome.

  The wonderful camaraderie that had flourished between Bogie and Gardner during the war years did not exist on the set of Contessa. He got top billing, but he was drawing only half the salary that she was.

  As a founding member of the Rat Pack, Bogie was a close friend of Frank Sinatra’s. Gardner had just separated from him.

  “I’ll never figure you broads out,” Bogie told her when they met on the set. Half the world’s female population would throw themselves at Frank’s feet, and here you are flouncing around with guys who wear capes and little ballerina slippers.”

  He
was referring to Luis Miguel Dominguín, the celebrated Spanish matador with whom she was having an affair.

  Although Gardner was putting away a massive amount of alcohol every day, Bogie told her he knew why she drank so little. “That’s because when you’re drunk you revert to your cornpone-and-molasses Southern accent. Then all your fancy friends will know you’re just a hillbilly gal.”

  “That’s what attracts them, honey chil’.”

  Mankiewicz was forced to shoot many takes of their scenes together. Either Gardner would flub her lines because of her “stage fright,” or else the scene would be interrupted by Bogie’s racking coughs, an early sign of the cancer that would eventually kill him.

  Bogie would often halt production, “God damn it, Mankiewicz, can you tell the dame here to speak up? I can’t hear a God damn word she’s saying.”

  When he was actually speaking to Gardner on the set, he told her, “I think I’m good for another decade or so. Then maybe Betty will support me. She’ll carry on for at least another forty years.” He was, of course, referring to his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall.

  Gardner was well aware of his affair with Verita Peterson. Bogie was also aware of her awareness. He told her, “When Betty arrives in Rome, I’ve got to stash Verita somewhere. We can’t go carrying on right in front of Betty.”

  “I’ll take her off your hands,” Gardner said.

  “Then those rumors about you are true,” he said.

  “That’s for you never to find out, honey chil’. Now get out of here. I need a bullfighter’s fuck now. To go on camera having just been fucked makes my skin more radiant.”

  “It makes my dick limp,” he said, exiting her dressing room.

  “Mr. Bogart didn’t make my life any easier,” Gardner said. “He was always needling me, calling me the Grabtown Gypsy, and complaining that he needed a running start toward the set if he wasn’t going to be trampled by my entourage.”

  Gardner also didn’t endear herself to Bogie after The Barefoot Contessa opened. Having learned that he didn’t like the word shit, she& penned the following note: “Bogie, just seen Contessa. I’m sure you’ll agree that I looked the most gorgeous I’ve ever been photographed. But, honey chil’, you looked like shit! Love, Ava.”