Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  “You asshole,” Curtiz obviously infuriated said. “The Lamarr cunt should have come to me. After all, I’m the director of this silly fairytale. How did it happen? An ugly guy like you born when Lincoln was president. Hedy Lamarr and Ingrid Bergman. Who’s next? Betty Grable? Lana Turner? Veronica Lake? Rita Hayworth?”

  “If you brag to me you fuck one of these cunts, I’ll cut off your dick if I can find it,” Curtiz threatened. You may be great with women off-screen, but you are lousy on screen. When you go to kiss Bergman, you look like you about to throw up. You’re no homosexual, are you? Errol Flynn told me you were always looking at his crotch. Ronald Reagan told me you made a pass at him in the men’s toilet.”

  “That was just a joke,” Bogie protested.

  “Don’t speak to me rest of day,” Curtiz said. “Just for fucking Hedy Lamarr, I’m gonna make you do one take thirty-two times.”

  Lamarr had made Ekstase ( Ecstasy ) when she was fifteen. She’d met the Fascist dictators during the course of her marriage (1933-1937) to Fritz Mandl, a Vienna-based arms manufacturer and multi millionaire. In those days she always appeared in public wearing a fortune in jewels, especially diamonds.

  For Casablanca’s supporting players, Curtiz had rounded up the usual suspects: Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Joy Page, Dooley Wilson, and Helmut Dantine.

  Claude Rains, in a brilliant screen portrayal, was cast as Captain Louis Renault, a corrupt Vichy opportunist who claims, “I have no convictions. I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.”

  Freelancer Rains, arguably the single most talented actor in the cast, certainly had a lot to smile about in his role, as he’d jacked up his salary from Jack Warner to $4,000 a week.& “Let the shoot drag on forever for all I care,” he told Bogie.

  Rains would go on to appear in Notorious, the Alfred Hitchcock film that also starred Bergman.

  The bulky Sydney Greenstreet played the small but pivotal role of Signor Ferrari, the jovial but sinister fez-wearing owner of the Blue Parrot, chief rival of Rick’s Café. That was his day job. At night he was Casablanca’s leading black marketer. Everything was for sale for a price, even a passport to get a refugee out of Casablanca and on the plane to Lisbon and freedom.

  Conrad Veidt, on loan from MGM, was paid the same amount that Bergman was, $25,000. Originally Curtiz had wanted Otto Preminger for the role of Major Strasser, but at the time, he was under contract to Darryl F. Zanuck, who demanded a salary of $7,000 a week. Jack Warner turned Preminger down.

  Veidt delivered his usual brilliant performance as the icily cold but elegant Gestapo major, Strasser, who likes vintage champagne and very cold caviar.

  Many of the actors who played Nazis in Casablanca were in fact German Jews who had escaped from Hitler’s Nazis. Veidt himself had hurriedly escaped Germany when he learned that the SS had sent a death squad after him because of his anti-Nazi activities.

  Peter Lorre was cast as the creepy petty criminal Ugarte, selling “letters of transit,” which he obtained through the murder of two Nazi couriers.

  In a key moment, Lorre as Ugarte asks Rick, “You despise me, don’t you?

  Rick answers, “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.”

  The defining moment occurs when Lorre is trapped by the police in Rick’s Café. He rushes to Rick, his eyes bulging with fright. “Rick,” he cries. “Do something! You must help me!”

  Rick shares his personal credo with Lorre. “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

  The unfortunate Lorre is hauled off by the police and assassinated.

  S.Z. Sakall, cast as Carl the waiter, was from Hungary. Although he had fled from Germany in 1939, each of his three sisters died in a concentration camp.

  Chubby-jowled Sakall had such rotund cuteness that he was nicknamed “Cuddles.” Bogie is claimed to have given him that nickname, but that does-n’t appear to be true. Sakall hated the part of the head waiter in Casablanca and turned it down. He finally took the role when he was guaranteed four weeks of work for $5,250. Sakall actually had more screen time than either Greenstreet or Lorre.

  Wallis had considered hiring female musicians such as Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, or Hazel Scott for the role that was eventually awarded to Dooley Wilson, who played Sam. Warners feared a backlash, especially in Southern theaters, for giving such a pivotal role to a black woman.

  Wilson was a professional drummer who had to fake his piano playing. Since the music was recorded at the same time as the film, the piano playing was actually by Elliot Carpenter who performed behind a curtain. He was positioned so that Dooley could watch—and copy—his hand movements.

  Curtiz was not without female companionship on the set. As Henreid revealed, “Curtiz, befitting the reputation of most Hungarians, was a practiced womanizer and was known to hire pretty young extras to whom he promised all sorts of things, including stardom, just to have them around and make passes at them at any odd hours when there was a break in shooting. He would choose any private place on the set, usually behind some flat in a secluded area. He’d have the grips move a piece of furniture there, a couch, or even a mattress—almost anything to soften his lovemaking.”

  “But I didn’t go for Bergman,” Curtiz recalled. “I decided to give Bogie a chance. I had plenty of other broads to fuck on this picture.”

  At one point Lorre secretly hooked up a mike to Curtiz’s dressing room. The whole crew heard a script girl screaming. “Oh, God! No! No! I can’t take it! More, more, more!”

  For all the cast to hear, Curtiz shouted “Take it all, take it all—my balls too!”

  One of the emotional highlights of the film was the “duel of the anthems,” between the French singing La Marseillaise and the Nazis warbling Die Wacht am Rhein.

  Censorship continued to plague the film. Ilsa says, “Victor is my husband, and was, even when I knew you in Paris.” This was almost cut, as it suggested adultery. However, at a later point, she claimed that she thought Victor was dead at the time of her affair with Bogie. The censors then agreed to let the line stay.

  As he stated in Love and Death in Casablanca, author William Donelley claimed that “Rick’s relationship with Sam, and subsequently with Renault, is a standard case of repressed homosexuality that underlies most American adventure stories.”

  That’s why one of the most famous of all straight love stories, the celluloid romance of Bogart and Bergman, always ends up on a list of most famous gay films.

  Gays claim that the real love story is not between Rick and Ilsa, but between Rick and Captain Louis Renault, as played by Claude Rains.

  One viewer claimed that for him, the most& interesting relationship in the movie is between Rick and Louis. “Theirs is a relationship of almost perfect cynicism, one-liners, and claims of neutrality that provide much humor, as well as gives a necessary display of Rick’s darker side before and after Ilsa’s arrival.”

  Many famous movie reviewers, including Roger Ebert, knew that Rains was playing a “subtly homosexual police chief.”

  Rains as Louis is obviously besotted with the super-butch Rick. In Rick’s presence, Rains becomes almost like a school girl. Gays picked up on such lines as when Louis says to Rick: “You were never interested in any woman.”

  Louis also tells Rick: “She [Ilsa] was asking questions about you earlier, Rick, in a way that made me extremely jealous.” Rains said “extremely jealous” in such a way that only a redneck homophobe could not have picked up on what he meant.

  At the end of the film, after Ilsa, accompanied by her husband, is airborne, the captain walks away with his man. Bogie famously drawls, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” World War II audiences didn’t get this homoerotic overtone.

  The line, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” was voted No. 54 among “The 100 Greatest Movie Lines” of all time.

  Wallis came up with this line after the f
ilm was finished. Bogie was called back to the Warner lot to dub it in.

  In fact, Casablanca ended up having more famous one-liners than any other movie in history.

  One of the most famous lines of the movie, “Play it again, Sam,” was never uttered. The actual dialogue was, “You played it for her, you can play it for me. Play it!”

  Ilsa says, “Play it, Sam, play ‘As Time Goes By.’”

  In name recognition, “Round up the usual suspects” came in No. 32, with “We’ll always have Paris” voted No. 43.

  Reportedly, the line, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” was improvised by Bogie when he appeared as a star in the little-seen film Midnight in 1934. The movie’s line was voted the fifth most famous movie quotation of all time by the American Film Institute.

  Bogie fell in love with the word “kid” when describing his screen women. In Dead Reckoning (1947), he called Lizabeth Scott “kid” twice. Again in Tokyo Joe (1949), he called the Czech-born actress Florence Marly “Hello, kid.” Finally, in Sirocco (1951), he tells Marta Toren, “You’re a sweet kid!”

  Bogie added another line to the script other than the “kid” reference. He was given the line, “Of all the cafés in all the cities in all the world, she walks into my café.” He changed it to, “Of all the gin-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

  When the Allies invaded Casablanca on November 8, 1942, Jack Warner went into a tizzy, as he was urged to incorporate the invasion into the film’s storyline. Hal Wallis thought the invasion could be presented as an epilogue for the spring release of Casablanca. The producer was prepared to shoot a sequence in which Bogie and Claude Rains hear about the invasion. However, Warner eventually nixed the idea, thinking the invasion worthy of a film all on its own and not just as an epilogue. It was decided to release Casablanca as a pre-invasion story.

  Bogie had his greatest moment on film when he stood on the gray tarmac with those fog machines blasting away. In his rumpled trench coat and fedora, he looked into Bergman’s eyes welling with tears.

  “You’re saying this only to make me go,” Bergman says.

  “I’m saying it because it’s true. You belong with Victor. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not on it, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life. I’m not good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Here’s looking at you, kid.”

  ***

  As Laurence Leamer, Bergman’s biographer, put it: “For Bogie, it was booze, blood, and brawls, a butcher knife in the back, a fistfight in the living room, pistol shots in the ceiling. It was a wife so jealous of Ingrid that he didn’t dare get near his co-star. It was life as a forty-two-year-old& balding actor with an alcoholic wife, a drinking problem of his own, and a co-star so beautiful, so irresistible, so shrewdly professional, that he was likely to lose the movie to her.”

  Night after night, Methot fought bitterly with Bogie over his alleged affair with Bergman. Finally, Bogie had had it. He told Curtiz, “If you have the name, why not play the game? I’m going after the Swedish broad. I’m an ass man myself, and that gal’s got ass.”

  As a Hollywood insider, Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, his third wife, knew much of what was going on, especially off camera. From the very beginning of her marriage, she’d suspected that Bogie was a “whoremonger” [her words], and she never changed that opinion. She’d known many actresses personally with whom he’d had brief flings in the 1930s.

  Methot also knew that Ingrid Bergman’s screen image had nothing to do with the private woman. Alfred Hitchcock, who directed her in several later films, claimed “She’d do it with doorknobs.”

  She was “Notorious” (the name of one of her movies) for having affairs with her leading men. They included Leslie Howard, co-star in Intermezzo (1939); both actor Spencer Tracy and director Victor Fleming on the set of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941); Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and Saratoga Trunk (1945); Joseph Cotten in Gaslight (1944); Bing Crosby in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945); Gregory Peck in Spellbound (1945); Yul Brynner in Anastasia (1956); Anthony Quinn in The Visit (1964), and Omar Sharif in The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964), plus numerous other actors and directors, including her “sponsor,” David Selznick himself.

  Why should Bogie be exempt?

  The homosexual actor, Anthony Perkins, claimed that Bergman tried to seduce him on the set of Goodbye Again (1961). She did not succeed.

  Spencer Tracy was quoted as saying, “Ingrid worked best when she was in love with her leading man. Beginning with Leslie Howard in Intermezzo, she seduced all of us.” He’d made Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with her in 1941.

  Larry Adler, the world’s most famous harmonica player, whom Ingrid met on a USO tour in 1945, was egocentric and a political leftist. Bergman’s long talks with him turned into an affair.

  Adler later said, “I think she needed to show her power over men. She wasn’t coquettish or a tease. Ingrid wasn’t interested in sex all that much. She did it like a polite girl.”

  In that opinion, Adler was a minority of one.

  Bergman was wise not to allow any of the details of her affairs with her leading men of the 1940s to be revealed. Her virginal image as a model of propriety was shattered when her affair with the Italian director, Roberto Rossellini, was revealed in 1949. The affair and her subsequent pregnancy shocked her fans and sent her into exile from America for seven long years.

  Although it seems silly today, her affair caused national outrage and she was denounced for her “immorality” on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In the wake of that, the press tore her reputation to shreds. She was temporarily “soiled” among puritanical moviegoers who refused to even tolerate her image on the screen.

  One of Bergman’s most famous off-screen remarks about Bogie was when she said, “I kissed Bogie. But I never got to know him.”

  Later among her friends in Sweden, when she had nothing more to lose career-wise, she admitted, “I did say that. Can’t a woman say something that is not true? That happens all the time. Why should the world at that time have known about my private relationship with Bogie? I didn’t announce any of my other affairs with leading men. Why should I have with Bogie? It would not have helped either of us. Besides, what went on between Bogie and me is our own personal business.”

  In an interview in her native Sweden in later years, she recalled, “What could I say? That we were carrying on passionately and had a brief but torrid fling? We were both married at the time. An adulterous affair—look at what happened to me later—could have destroyed my career. It probably would not have affected Bogie’s own career that much.”

  There is no real proof that Bogie and Bergman had an affair. Likewise, there is no proof that they did not. Eyewitnesses claim they did, notably& Michael Curtiz, who had his finger on the heartbeat of every member of the cast.

  When Curtiz found Bogie becoming “love sick,” he warned him, “Ingrid’s trapped in a bad marriage. For her fun, she fucks her leading men, then forgets them. Don’t fall in love with her. She’s poison. Other men fall for cunt, then regret it. She’ll break your heart.”

  “After marrying Mayo Methot,” he said, “I no longer have a heart to break.”

  He confided to Ann Sheridan that he’d fallen in love with Bergman and had asked her to marry him, after both of them had gotten divorces from Methot and Bergman’s Swedish doctor husband, Petter Lindstrom.

  Bogie even gave Sheridan a review of Bergman in bed: “She’s great but won’t fellate me.”

  Rossellini, Bergman’s future husband, had much the same complaint, claiming that his new wife would not perform fellatio on him, one of his major sexual pleasures. “She doesn’t do the things a whore does. For that, I have to go to a bordello.”

  Claude Rains later told Bette Davis that when he dropped by Bogie’s dressing room for a drink, Bergman was adju
sting her dress and Bogie zipping up. “I assumed that they had been rehearsing their love scenes,” he said sarcastically. “What else could it have been?”

  Henreid also told Davis that Bogie and Bergman were having an affair.

  “I’d heard that she ‘auditions’ all her leading men,” Davis snorted. “No doubt she’s trying to rival Joan Crawford in& that department.” Davis looked skeptically at Henreid. “Do you think you and Bogie will share her during the shooting?”

  “I think I’m out in the cold,” Henreid said. “She told me I look too much like Petter.” He was referring, of course, to Bergman’s husband, Petter Lindstrom.

  Spencer Tracy, Bogie’s pal, told George Cukor that Bogie and Bergman were having an affair, and gossipy Cukor spread the word.

  Bob Williams, Bogie’s publicist on Casablanca, later claimed. “I think Bogie fell in love with Ingrid. He was so jealous that if I brought anyone on the set, especially another man, to see her he was furious at me. He would sulk. I had a feeling he wanted Ingrid for himself.”

  Jack Warner seemed to know about the affair. When Bogie showed up late on the set two days in a row, Warner fired off a memo to Curtiz: “Tell Bogart to quit fucking the Swedish broad all night long and report on time. In one of the rushes, he looks sixty years old. Tell him to clean up his act. The Swedish pussy can wait until picture’s end. Then he can have a whole fucking smörgåsbord.”

  Vincent Sherman, Bogie’s sometimes director, claimed that Bogie told him that he had an affair with Bergman all throughout the shooting of Casablanca. “Forget all those stupid biographies that claimed Bergman and Bogie didn’t have an affair. He fucked her during the entire making of Casablanca, and fell madly in love with her. In spite of that saintly look, that cold Swede was hot to trot once you got her pants off.”

  Methot frequented the set for confrontations with Bogie. She accused him of having an affair with Bergman. In this case she was right.