Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  That chemistry was undeniable both on and off the screen, although biographers for years have perpetuated a myth, spread by Bergman herself, that she had almost no contact with Bogie off camera. Methot knew better.

  Emotionally deranged even without provocation, she allowed her fury to bubble over one afternoon. Halfway through the shooting of Casablanca, the picture came close to not being finished, at least with Bogie and Bergman in the leads.

  An anonymous letter had been sent to Methot. It read:

  “When your errant husband isn’t needed on the set, he disappears into the dressing room of Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish cow. The sounds coming from that dressing room can be heard all over the sound stage. Your husband can be seen leaving Bergman’s room zipping up his pants. They are engaged in a torrid affair. How many nights does he come home late? You answer that question for yourself.”

  The next afternoon Methot showed up on the set. Somehow she’d obtained a pistol. It was later revealed that she planned to shoot both Bogie and Bergman, hopefully after she’d caught them together.

  When she got there, from a distance, she saw Bogie innocently playing chess with Lorre. She asked the script girl to direct her to Bergman’s dressing room.

  The script girl rushed to tell Bogie what was going on. Sensing trouble, he jumped up, according to Lorre, and raced to Methot. Confronting her, he discovered that she packed a pistol. He fought with her to wrest it from her tightly clenched fingers. The gun went off. Instead of shooting him, the bullet was fired into the air, alerting the entire crew.

  Bergman emerged from her dressing room. Rather calmly she walked over to Methot.

  “Mrs. Bogart,” she said, “I recognize you from your photographs which do not do you justice. Your devoted husband here has told me what a wonderful person you are. It’s an honor to meet you. I’m sorry they didn’t find a role for you in this picture. I saw you in Marked Woman with Mr. Bogart. You stole that picture from both your husband and Bette Davis.” Then Bergman, showing enormous grace under pressure, turned and walked away.

  Methot seemed stunned and didn’t know how to react. At this point Curtiz arrived with two stagehands. Lorre had told him what had happened. Curtiz ordered that Methot be forcibly removed from the set and barred from entering the studio gates again until Casablanca was wrapped.

  Bogie’s reaction to this drama taking place off camera is not known. He didn’t want to speak about it to Curtiz, to Lorre, or to anybody.

  Under the cloak of darkness. Bogie came and went from the place where Bergman was staying, since her husband was back on the East Coast with her daughter, Pia Lindstrom.

  On the final night Bogie saw Bergman, he invited her to an out-of-the way restaurant to celebrate the end of filming.

  It was on that fateful night that Bergman gave Bogie “the worst news of my life.” She rejected his proposal to marry him after their respective divorces from Lindstrom and Methot.

  She explained to him that she was going back to her husband in “dreary, boring” Rochester, New York. “There is no great romance there, but I have a daughter, Pia. I owe it to her to go back and be a mother. I can’t leave either of them.”

  Bogie was said to have cried that night, and he was a man who didn’t cry very often.

  Although it may be apocryphal, Ann Sheridan later claimed that Bergman, as a final goodbye, told Bogie, “We’ll always have Paris.”

  ***

  Curtiz brought the film in just eleven days over schedule. Problems arose along the way. He constantly fought with Bogie over script changes, which delayed production. As shooting began, the actors did not have a working script. Curtiz handed them new pages of dialogue on the morning of each day’s shoot.

  Max Steiner complained to Curtiz about the song, “As Time Goes By.” It’s got to be cut from the final score,” Steiner demanded.

  “Like hell!” Curtiz shouted at him. “I love that song. You’re an idiot!”

  Casablanca, budgeted at $950,000 ran over budget, going $100,000 into the red, much to the fury of Jack Warner.

  In one of his final interviews, Henreid revealed what had never been told before.

  One night he was called back for “still” sittings with Bergman. Warners planned to use these photographs for publicity purposes.

  Bergman seemed heartbroken. Henreid assumed that it was because her affair with Bogie was going badly. “I knew that she had broken it off with him, and she looked very sad,” he said. “I was completely mistaken when she revealed what was really wrong. She went in and out of affairs with her leading men so quickly it did not seem to phase her.”

  She was actually heartbroken over the loss of the role of María in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, the part having gone to Vera Zorina.

  “Those idiots,” Bergman told Henreid. “Picking Zorina of all people. She can’t act. She just can’t, and I’m good. I’m really good!”

  Born in Berlin, Zorina was an American ballerina, musical theater actress, and choreographer. At the time she was considered for For Whom the Bell Tolls, she was married to the famous choreographer George Balanchine.

  When word got out that Zorina had been fired from For Whom the Bell Tolls, and replaced by Bergman, her film career was more or less destroyed in Hollywood. She never recovered from the blow. Although she tried for other major roles, she failed to find them. In 1946, she said good-bye to Hollywood.

  In the middle of the photography session,& Bergman was called to the phone. During her conversation, she let out a yell that Henreid compared to that of “a tigress who has made a kill, a yell of such joy and triumph that I was stunned.”

  Returning to him, she kissed Henreid on the lips. “I got it! I got it! Zorina is out. I’m María. I got it! Paul, we’ve got to celebrate!”

  It was at this point in his memoirs that Henreid drew the curtains, the way movie directors in the 1930s did when a man and woman faded into the bedroom to make love.

  “That night,” I learned what Bergman meant by celebrate,” Henreid said. “It wasn’t just the champagne. In spite of her cool demeanor, she was that tigress in bed, the same blood-curdling scream I’d heard on the phone when she got the part of María. Over pillow talk, as you Americans say, she told me that I was a much better lover than Bogie—much smoother in bed, more suave, more capable of making a woman feel like a real woman. She also told me that in spite of all the experiences he’d had with women, Bogie still approached a woman in bed with a certain schoolboy awkwardness.”

  Suave, sleepy-eyed Henreid, whose acting style was “as rigid as a board” in Casablanca, enjoyed only a passing vogue in the 1940s, mainly as a continental lover. Decades after his appearance in Casablanca, he expressed a bitterness against the movie. He especially disliked its director and Bogie himself.

  Many of Henreid’s fans assumed he was French born. Actually, the actor was Austrian, having been born in Trieste (now part of Italy) when that city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  “Mr. Bogie Man was a nobody,” he claimed shortly before he died in 1992. “That is, before Casablanca he was a nobody. He was the fellow Robinson or Cagney would say, ‘Get him!’ He was always a very mediocre actor with an extremely limited range. He was so sorry for himself in Casablanca. Unfortunately, Michael Curtiz was not a director of actors; he was a director of effects. He was first rate at that, but he could not tell Bogart he should not play the role of Rick like a crybaby. It was embarrassing, I thought, when I looked at the rushes.”

  Those negative comments about Bogie were deleted from his 1984 autobiography called Ladies’ Man. Henreid’s editor at St. Martin’s Press felt it might harm the potential sale of the book.

  “I would much prefer that I be remembered for my role opposite Bette Davis in Now, Voyager,” he claimed. “If I had it to do over again, I would never have accepted the role in Casablanca.”

  The stories that Henreid spread in the interviews he gave during his later years did not appear in his memoir
s and cannot be verified at this late date. Perhaps he was getting some long-delayed revenge on Bogie. Or perhaps the incident he described that night with Bergman really was true.

  Much of the initial success of Casablanca resulted from the sweeping historical events that had inspired its plot. In November of 1942, Allied forces landed in Morocco, forming a beachhead at Casablanca. Then in January of 1943, the famous Casablanca Conference took place between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in a suburb of Casablanca. It was at this conference that Roosevelt announced that “unconditional surrender” would be demanded of the Axis powers.

  Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theater in New York City on November 26, 1942. It was timed to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of Casablanca. But it didn’t go into general release until January 23, 1943, when it took advantage of the publicity generated by the Casablanca Conference.

  After President Franklin D. Roosevelt returned from the war-time conference in Casablanca with Sir Winston Churchill, he asked for a screening of Casablanca at the White House [“Casa Blanca” in Spanish].

  During its initial run, the film was a solid but not spectacular success. The legend would come later. In time, its characters, dialogue, and music would become iconic.

  In its aftermath, many bizarre legends arose about the movie, including one that claimed that Jack Benny had appeared briefly in it.

  Not all the reviews were raves, The New Yorker referring to it as only “pretty tolerable.” The New York Times, in contrast, asserted that it “makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” Variety claimed that Bogie was “more at ease as the bitter and cynical operator of a joint than as a lover,” and Bogie himself agreed with that review.

  When Julius Epstein saw the final script, on which so many others had labored, he said, it contained “more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there’s nothing better.” He later expressed grave reservations about the script, calling it “slick shit.”

  “Casablanca is one of my least favorite pictures,” Epstein said. “I’m tired of talking about it after thirty years. I can explain its success only by the Bogie cult that has sprung up after his death. I can recognize that the picture is entertaining and that people love it. But it’s a completely phoney romance, a completely phoney picture. For instance, nobody knew what was going on in Casablanca at the time. Nobody had ever been to Casablanca. The whole thing was shot in the back lot. There was never a German who appeared in Casablanca for the duration of the entire war, and we had Germans marching around with medals and epaulets. Furthermore, there were never any such things as letters of transit around which the entire plot revolved. . . . the movie is completely phoney!”

  Actually, there were some Nazis in Casablanca during the early 1940s. These Germans were arrested when the Allied invasion occurred. Those “letters of transit” were actually visas and exit papers which were eagerly bought by European refugees wanting to escape to Lisbon where they could subsequently arrange transport to New York.

  Both Bogie and Bergman later claimed that they were wrong about the impact and the importance of Casablanca. “We thought we were making a B movie, and that was how it was viewed at the time,” Bogie said. “I was used to making B movies. To me, Casablanca was just another assignment. It took me years to realize that it was a picture that ranked up there with Citizen Kane as one of the greatest movies ever made.”

  Bergman later said, “Regardless of how many more movies I make, or how many Oscars I win, when I die The New York Times will give me a front page headline that says ‘CO-STAR OF CASABLANCA DIES.’”

  Movie buffs have long pondered why Bergman and Bogie never made another film together, given their on-screen chemistry.

  The success of Casablanca led Warner to plan a sequel. It was to be called Brazzaville. However, Bergman was not available. Geraldine Fitzgerald, whom Bogie had appeared with in Dark Victory, was considered for the role, before the project was killed. In the late 1990s, Michael Walsh’s novel, As Time Goes By, was published as the sequel.

  For his role as Rick, Bogie took home exactly $36,667, in contrast to Lorre, who made only $2,333. Curtiz was the highest grosser, earning $73,400.

  Following the release of Casablanca, Bogie would become the highest paid actor in Hollywood, and in the world for that matter. He would reign as Tinseltown’s biggest star from 1943 to 1949.

  After hitting it big in Casablanca, Bogie was no longer Duke Mantee, gangster at large, or Sam Spade, detective at large. After the release of Casablanca, he could& virtually play any character part he wanted, ranging from the seedy captain of The African Queen to the psychotic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

  The date was March 2, 1944, the setting Grauman’s Chinese Theater. When it was announced that Casablanca had been designated as Best Picture of 1943, the audience gasped. It had not been a heavy favorite.

  Paramount’s For Whom the Bell Tolls or Warner Brothers’ Watch on the Rhine were considered the major contenders. Bogie lost his chance for the Oscar, as Paul Lukas walked off with the Best Actor prize for Watch on the Rhine, in which he’d co-starred with Bette Davis. Claude Rains, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, lost to Charles Coburn for The More the Merrier.

  Accepting his Oscar as Best Director, Curtiz said: “So many times I have a speech ready, but no dice. Always a bridesmaid, never a mother. Now I win, I have no speech.”

  Casablanca was nominated and won the Oscar as Best Picture of the Year.

  Wallis rose to accept the Oscar until he noted Jack Warner hurrying down the aisle. It was an Academy tradition that the producer of the film accepts the Best Picture Oscar, not a studio head.

  Wallis was so incensed that he never forgave Warner. Up to then Wallis had been regarded as the Wünderkind of Warners, but he left the studio shortly after that slight at the Academy Awards ceremony.

  ***

  Bogie invited Ann Sheridan to the Casablanca wrap party. Ironically, Sheridan was to have been the award-winning film’s female star. With her was her newly minted close friend, a demure little brunette.

  “Bogie,” she said, “I want you to meet a good friend of mine and the best hairdresser in Hollywood. She can do wonders for that toupée of yours. Meet Verita Peterson.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Who is this good-looking broad?” Bogie asked of Ann Sheridan.

  “Those words were the first I ever heard from Bogie,” Verita Peterson recalled. “Romantic, don’t you think?”

  “After that intro, Annie wandered off and threw herself at Michael Curtiz, so we figured we’d seen the last of her,” Verita said.

  Verita Bouvaire Peterson, locked into an unhappy marriage to Robert Peterson, a studio technician, met a middle-aged but rising star, Humphrey Bogart, who was also locked into an unhappy marriage to Mayo Methot.

  At the wrap party for Casablanca, she later recalled, “No one on the set, including Bogie and Michael Curtiz, knew they’d made a classic.”

  “Bogie didn’t like to dance, but, honey, we danced the night away,” she said in an interview in 1998. “From that night on we were lovers.”

  The attractive little brunette who would become his mistress and the “custodian of his toupée” was a hard-drinking beauty who could match Bogie drink for drink. “I liked to down the booze. He liked to down the booze. I could match him cuss word for cuss word, shot for shot. We did a lot of crazy things together, some of which I’d rather forget. It got a little kinky at times, but so what? The war was going to end one day, although when I met Bogie I thought we might lose it.”

  “From the very beginning, Bogie told me he’d never marry me,” she said. “‘Marriage is a trap,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trapped too long. When I escape from Mayo, I never want to be trapped again. But we’ll have a lot of fun, and having fun is what life is all about.’”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she whispered into his ear as he whirled her
around the dance floor.

  Half-Irish, half-Mexican, Verita arrived in Hollywood straight from Arizona. “I didn’t know a God damn thing about acting, but I felt a gal like me could have a hell of a good time in Hollywood. When I won a beauty contest, Miss Arizona, I decided to try to capitalize off it. In fact, after a few auditions on the casting couch, I got a job at Republic.”

  “I was cast in a Western and fell off my horse the first day and broke my arm,” Verita said. “I was soon out of Republic but got to fuck John Wayne and Forrest Tucker.”

  “Then I got picked up by the pool one day by this Frenchman who’d come to America with a huge amount of French lace and a lot of beautiful hair from the convents of Europe,” she said. “Believe it or not, French lace is one of the best foundations for making great wigs and toupées. Because France had been invaded by Hitler’s armies, the lace was not available all during the war.”

  “I’d inherited a lot of money from my grandfather who had died, and I agreed to stake this guy,” she said. “I bought a brand new car, figuring it would be the last one made until the war was over. I filled it with his wigs, toupées, and falls and started making the rounds of all the studios. That’s how I met Bogie’s pal, Ann Sheridan. They’d had this little fling, but once they got the fucking out of the way, they found they really liked each other and became pals.”

  “I did wigs for women, but a lot of the men were having problems with their hair too,” Verita said. “I’d become a licensed hairdresser. I found the men more fun to work with than the ladies. Within a year, I’d been fucked by Ray Milland, Charles Boyer, and Gary Cooper. Not bad.”

  “When I met Annie at Max Factor, she was just coming down from a fling with Ronald Reagan,” Verita said. “He wasn’t my type at all. He had to have his flings during the day because Jane Wyman kept him locked in a cage at night—just joking.”

  “Gary Cooper was at the wrap party for Casablanca,” Verita said. “I’d already had him, so Ingrid Bergman was welcome to him. She was obviously making a big play for him, and they were about to make a movie together. Having dumped Bogie, she was pursuing her next leading man.”