Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  After an investigation from the F.B.I. cleared him of any Communism connections—once again—he was scheduled to travel abroad with his wife.

  Bogie told Peter Lorre, “Here we are fighting Hitler and the Japs, but all the War Department is concerned with is do I have any Communist connections. Russia is our ally in this war. Why don’t they ask if I’m a Nazi spy? There’s word out there that Errol Flynn is flirting with some Nazis, although I find that hard to believe.”

  In November of 1944, with the war still raging in Europe, Bogie, along with Methot, began a ten-week tour of North Africa, West Africa, and Southern Italy. Their itinerary would transit across 35,000 miles of war-torn terrain.

  Along with the unhappily married couple were actor Don Cummings and accordionist Ralph Hark. Bogie dubbed them “The Filthy Four.” Guest appearances before thousands of GIs began with a local band playing “As Time Goes By.” The Casablanca legend was already in the making.

  Onstage during some of the troop entertainments, Bogie apologized for not being “a dancing fool” like James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy. “Edward G. Robinson claims he had the most beautiful legs at Warners in the 1930s,” Bogie told the audience. That line always got a big laugh. “Not having gams like Robinson, I can’t show off my toothpick legs, but I’ll bring out my wife who was a Broadway stage beauty. Mayo Methot.”

  “She’s the only real entertainer here,” Bogie said, knowingly or otherwise insulting Cummings and Hark.

  Methot usually got heavy applause, and she sang some blues numbers and show tunes from Broadway of the 1920s. Her favorite song for entertaining the battle-weary troops was “More Than You Know.”

  From Berlin, Joseph Goebbels broadcast an attack on Bogie, referring to him as one of America’s most noted gangsters before he entered into films, perhaps confusing his past with that of George Raft’s. “That Humphrey Bogart is the best that America has to send abroad clearly demonstrates the complete breakdown of American morals,” Goebbels charged. “Under the dire command of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the whoremonger in the White House, the Americans are destined to lose the war.”

  When Bogie landed in the actual city of Casablanca, GIs recognized him, each one demanding, “Show me the way to Rick’s. Is my first drink on the house?”

  An officer in charge of their tour wrote back to his home in Pennsylvania. “The Battle of North Africa took on new meaning with the arrival of The Battling Bogarts. They are a disaster. They’re polite to each other on stage, but off stage they’re killers.”

  One infantryman insulted Bogie by asking him, “Couldn’t Warner Brothers have sent Ann Sheridan instead of you and that wife of yours?”

  “See that scar on my lip?” Bogie asked the soldier. “Do you want one for yourself? Back off!”

  Freezing in the cold and in his long johns, Bogie with Methot arrived in newly liberated Naples to perform their show in the San Carlo Opera House, which had been spared during the many Allied bombing raids which rained destruction down around it.

  Looking like a combat veteran himself, Bogie appeared on stage, hawking his tough guy image.& “Listen, you guys, I’m& formin’ a gang to take back& to Chicago. Any of you guys& wanna go back with me?”

  No one laughed. The audience was filled with troops who were surviving on “inhuman rations” and often freezing in the winter cold. On a brief four-day leave, they were going to be sent back to fight Germans, and many expected the only way they’d see Chicago, or their hometown in America, was feet first.

  When their supply of liquor ran out, the Bogarts switched to cognac, which Methot likened to rancid olive oil. “But we guzzled the stuff.”

  Methot later claimed that “I fell in love with Bogie all over again when we were visiting wounded soldiers in a hospital outside Naples. One guy had had both legs and an arm amputated.”

  “The soldier from his hospital bed looked into Bogie’s eyes and asked him, ‘Will my gal still accept me like this?’” Methot said.

  “She’ll not only accept you but love you more than ever,” Bogie assured the twenty-two-year-old.

  In letters back home, Methot said, “We slept in blankets on the floor; we bounced in Jeeps for endless hours over incredibly rough roads; we trudged through mud, and we still did our stuff.”

  Bogie virtually had to offer a bribe to get a bed for Methot and himself in the Army’s VIP Hotel in Naples. One officer reported that the Bogarts, back from an all-night party with the troops, had guns and started shooting up the hotel in the early morning hours. The sleeping officers at first thought it was an attack from the Nazis.

  One general in his boxer shorts removed the guns from the Bogarts and asked them to check out.

  Northeast of Naples in Caserta, the Bogarts had a reunion with Captain John Huston. Bogie renewed his friendship with the director, who was always contemptuous of Methot. He called her “The Rosebud.”

  Jealous of the camaraderie between Bogie and Huston, Methot tried to take over the reunion. She rose to sing.

  “She was drunk,” Huston recalled. “She couldn’t sing. Everything off key. It was humiliating for Bogie to sit through it and have me sit through it.”

  Later in his film, Key Largo, starring Bogie, Huston would insert a similar scene, when he had Edward G. Robinson force Claire Trevor to sing off key.

  When they returned to Naples, Bogie and Methot checked into a seedy hotel, where they staged a raucous all-night party for enlisted men. The noise was so loud that a general, lodging in a room across the hallway, knocked on their door. He ordered Bogie and Methot to go to bed and tell their guests to leave.

  When Bogie refused, the general politely asked him again.

  This time Bogie told the general to “fuck off.” The next morning Bogie and Methot received a notice to leave Naples at once on the next available Army transport.

  ***

  They reached New York on the cold, rainy morning of February 15, 1944.

  Arriving exhausted after a grueling flight, the Bogarts checked into the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue. Jack Warner himself stayed there on his visits to New York. A wire was waiting for Bogie to report to Warners for the start of To Have and Have Not.

  Bogie was in no condition to return to the Warner sound stages in California. He was also drinking heavily and needed a vacation. Instead of responding to the urgent request from Warner Brothers and Howard Hawks, he sent a telegram to Peter Lorre instead. “Mayo and I have the distinction of being thrown off two continents,” it said.

  Beginning at around midnight, the Bogarts wrecked their hotel suite, tossing lamps and furniture around. They woke up everyone on their floor. The manager was summoned from his bed to confront them. He asked them to check out at once and pay damages.

  Bogie refused. The bill for damages was later sent to Warner Brothers. The studio chief ordered that the amount be deducted from Bogie’s weekly salary.

  Leaving an angry, confrontational Methot to face the hotel manager, Bogie fled the building without telling his wife where he was going. She was alarmed that in his drunken state, he might get run over in New York’s wartime traffic.

  Returning, eventually, to the Gotham the following morning in time to check out at nine o’clock, Bogie faced Methot. She demanded to know, “What whore did you sleep with last night?”

  For the first time in his relationship, Bogie decided to tell her the truth. “Helen Menken,” he said calmly. “I asked her to remarry me after my divorce from you comes through.” At that point, what remained of their hotel suite was wrecked.

  Word arrived once again from Jack Warner, demanding that Bogie return to Burbank at once, since shooting on To Have and Have Not could not be delayed any longer. The studio chief threatened to hold Bogie personally responsible for the cost of any further delays on the picture.

  Defiantly, Bogie sent word that he planned to remain in New York “with my divorced first wife, Miss Helen Menken, Broadway star.”

  Warner even threatened the Army th
at it would no longer send stars on USO tours if Bogart wasn’t returned immediately. Then the studio chief was informed that Bogie was still under military jurisdiction. The Army issued orders for Bogie to fly immediately to Los Angeles.

  Because of wartime conditions, there were no flights available. Bogie, along with Methot, was booked on the train, the Twentieth Century Limited. The reservations were for Thursday night. At the last minute Bogie bolted. No one could find him.

  A call from the Army to Menken’s apartment brought her to the phone. She denied having any knowledge of his whereabouts. Of course, she could have been covering for him, and no doubt was.

  Methot was waiting at Grand Central Station Thursday night hoping Bogie would appear. Extreme manipulation and endless phone conversations had transpired behind the scenes. At one point Warner had threatened to sue him for breach of contract.

  Two minutes before the train was set to leave the station, Bogie appeared without any explanation to Methot about where he’d been.

  In Chicago, Howard Hawks, the director of To Have and Have Not, had a telegram delivered to Bogie’s compartment on the train.

  “We have an exciting new girl I want to appear opposite you in our film,” he wrote. “Anxiously awaiting your arrival at Union Station when the train pulls into Los Angeles.”

  On the train heading west, Bogie was grumpy. He complained to Methot, “Hawks has lined up what he calls his protégée. We know what protégée means. He’s cast some unknown teenage pussy opposite me. God damn, the bastard. That means I’ll have to carry the picture on my own. He wants some of my major stardom to rub off on his latest crush.”

  When I agreed to do this God damn picture, I was told that Ann Sheridan was to be my co-star,” Bogie said. “Now I get this schoolgal and clothes model. Just my fucking luck. Warner is sticking it up my ass once again.”

  ***

  Co-starring Bogie and Methot, a three-minute short film, Report from the Front (1944), was released in theaters across the country. Its sponsor was the Red Cross Drive Committee of the Motion Picture Industry, and the distributor was National Screen Service. The film begins with the arrival in North Africa of the Bogarts on December 11, 1943, for their three-month tour entertaining the troops. They are shown visiting Army camps, military bases, hospitals, and field units.

  Bogie handled the narration and issued an appeal for donations for the war effort.

  Report from the Front marked the last screen appearance of Mayo Methot.

  ***

  Before a final casting decision was made about who would play the female lead in To Have and Have Not, Howard Hawks asked Lauren Bacall to do a screen test. It was with the actor John Ridgely, who was under contract for Warners.

  Hawks wanted the scene “to be special” in his words, and he had written it himself. It became known as “the whistle scene.” In time it would become her most famous scene among her many screen appearances.

  The lines were provocative.

  At the doorway, as she is about to leave the room, she asks the main character.

  “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

  Days after filming her screen test, she was told that Bogie had seen it. She feared his reaction.

  Called to lunch with Hawks, she headed for his bungalow at the appointed time. Just as she was heading for the door, it opened. Bogie appeared. Having met with the director, he was just leaving.

  This was her second meeting with the star. He appeared to evaluate her more carefully this time, taking in her tawny blonde hair, her triangular catlike face, and her penetrating green eyes.

  Finally, he spoke, “I saw your test. We’ll have a lot of fun.”

  ***

  And so they did.