Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  1920: Way Down East (Griffith)

  1922: Orphans of the Storm (Griffith)

  1923: The White Sister (Henry King)

  1924: Romola (King)

  1926: The Scarlet Letter (Victor Sjöström); La Bohème (King Vidor)

  1928: The Wind (Sjöström)

  1933: His Double Life (Arthur Hopkins)

  1943: Commandos Strike at Dawn (John Farrow)

  1946: Miss Susie Slagle’s (John Berry)

  1947: Duel in the Sun (Vidor)

  1948: Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle)

  1955: The Cobweb (Vincente Minnelli); The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton)

  1960: The Unforgiven (John Huston)

  1967: The Comedians (Peter Glenville)

  1978: A Wedding (Robert Altman)

  1987: The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson)

  2

  HUMPHREY BOGART

  At the start of the twenty-first century, the American Film Institute published the results of a poll taken to determine the greatest stars of the movies’ golden age. Leading the list at number one was Humphrey Bogart. Nearly four decades earlier, in 1963—about seven years after Bogart’s death—I had felt the urge to write a piece about him. I wanted to call it “An American Hero,” and phoned Harold Hayes, Esquire’s legendary editor, to suggest this.

  He said, “Humphrey Bogart?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  He said, “But he’s dead.”

  I said, “OK, forget it.”

  About six months later, there appeared in Time magazine a one-column news item reporting the popularity of Bogart films at Harvard and a kind of underground cult among students that had formed around the actor. At exam time, the local theater ran Bogart pictures. That same week, Hayes called me: “Hi, buddy!” (He was Southern.) “How’d you like to do a piece on Bogart?”

  I said, “You read the thing in Time.”

  He said, “Do you want to do it or not?”

  It is the only profile I’ve ever done on a person I did not see in person or get to know, and my main intention was to draw a line between how his friends remembered Bogart and how his films presented him—the difference between reality and myth. Because I felt that Howard Hawks had best captured “the Bogart character,” which epitomized one’s popular image of him, in To Have and Have Not (out of Hemingway via Faulkner) and The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, with Faulkner trimmings), I began with a light parody of Chandler’s style:

  Humphrey Bogart as “Mad Dog” Roy Earle in the Sierra Mountains for the climactic sequence of Raoul Walsh’s tragic gangster film High Sierra (1941), written by John Huston (from a novel by W. R. Burnett). Playing older than his years, Bogart became a top star because of this picture. He had received second billing to star Ida Lupino but got the top position for every movie after it. The film was a touching climax of, and conclusion to, the thirties gangster genre at Warner Bros.

  Usually he wore the trench coat unbuttoned, just tied with the belt, and a slouch hat, rarely tilted. Sometimes it was a captain’s cap and a yachting jacket. Almost always his trousers were held up by a cowboy belt. You know the kind: one an Easterner waiting for a plane out of Phoenix buys just as a joke and then takes a liking to. Occasionally, he’d hitch up his slacks with it, and he often jabbed his thumbs behind it, his hands ready for a fight or a dame.

  Whether it was Sirocco or Casablanca, Martinique or Sahara, he was the only American around (except maybe for his buddy and the girl) and you didn’t ask him how he got there, and he always worked alone—except for the fellow who thought he took care of him, the rummy, the piano player, the one he took care of, the one you didn’t mess with. There was very little he couldn’t do, and in a jam he could do anything: remove a slug from a guy’s arm, fix a truck that wouldn’t start. He was an excellent driver, knowing precisely how to take those curves or how to lose a guy that was tailing him. He could smell a piece of a broken glass and tell you right away if there’d been poison in it, or he could walk into a room and know just where the button was that opened the secret door. At the wheel of a boat, he was beautiful.

  His expression was usually sour and when he smiled only the lower lip moved. There was a scar on his upper lip—maybe that’s what gave him the faint lisp. He would tug meditatively at his earlobe when he was trying to figure something out and every so often he had a strange little twitch—a kind of backward jerk of the sides of his mouth coupled with a slight squinting of the eyes. He held his cigarette (a Chesterfield) cupped in his hand. He looked right holding a gun.

  Unsentimental was a good word for him. “Leave ’im where he is,” he might say to a woman whose husband has just been wounded, “I don’t want ’im bleeding all over my cushions.” And blunt: “I don’t like you. I don’t like your friends and I don’t like the idea of her bein’ married to you.” And straight: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”

  He was tough; he could stop you with a look or a line. “Go ahead, slap me,” he’d say, or, “That’s right, go for it,” and there was in the way he said it just the right blend of malice, gleeful anticipation and the promise of certain doom. He didn’t like taking orders. Or favors. It was smart not to fool around with him too much.

  As far as the ladies were concerned, he didn’t have a lot of trouble with them, except maybe keeping them away. It was the girl who said if he needed anything, all he had to do was whistle; he never said that to the girl. Most of the time he’d call her “angel,” and if he liked her he’d tell her she was “good, awful good.”

  Whatever he was engaged in, whether it was being a reporter, a saloonkeeper, a gangster, a detective, a fishing-boat owner, a D.A. or a lawyer, he was impeccably, if casually, a complete professional. “You take chances,” someone would say. “I get paid to,” was his answer. But he never took himself too seriously. What was his job? a girl would ask. Conspiratorially, he’d lean in and say with the slightest flicker of a grin, “I’m a private dick on a case.” He wasn’t going to be taken in by Art either; he’d been to college, but he was a bit suspicious of the intellectuals. If someone mentioned Proust, he’d ask, “Who’s he?” even though he knew.

  Finally, he was wary of Causes. He liked to get paid for taking chances. He was a man who tried very hard to be Bad because he knew it was easier to get along in the world that way. He always failed because of an innate goodness which surely nauseated him. Almost always he went from belligerent neutrality to reluctant commitment. From “I stick my neck out for nobody” to “I’m no 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.” At the start, if the question was, “What are your sympathies?” the answer was invariably, “Minding my own business.” But by the end, if asked why he was helping, risking his life, he might say, “Maybe ’cause I like you. Maybe ’cause I don’t like them.” Of course it was always “maybe” because he wasn’t going to be that much of a sap, wasn’t making any speeches, wasn’t going to be a Good guy. Probably he rationalized it: “I’m just doing my job.” But we felt good inside. We knew better.

  In late 1963, the then very influential revival house, the New Yorker theater in Manhattan, ran the first U.S. retrospective of Humphrey Bogart movies—thirty of them (I helped to program it and wrote the accompanying notes). A one-day double bill of The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not broke all the theater’s attendance records. “I had two hundred people sitting on the floor,” said Daniel Talbot, owner of the long-gone 830-seat theater on the Upper West Side, co-producer of the brilliant Point of Order (1964), and still the most distinguished exhibitor (Manhattan’s Lincoln Plaza Cinemas) and distributor (New Yorker Films) of quality films in the country. “It was wild. I had to turn away a couple of hundred people. And that audience! First time Bogie appeared they applauded,
and that was just the beginning. Any number of scenes got hands. And the laughs! Bogart is very hot right now,” Talbot told me at the time. “It’s more than a cult, it’s something else, too. He’s not consciously hip, but hip by default. You get the feeling that he lives up to the Code. Anyone who screws up deserves the fate of being rubbed out by Bogart. With Bogart you get a portrait of a patriot, a man interested in the landscape of America. I think he’s an authentic American hero—more existential than, say, Gary Cooper, but as much in the American vein, and more able to cope with the present.” Talbot paused and grinned. “Frankly, I just like to watch him at work. He hits people beautifully.”

  The French had a more intellectual, if nonetheless affectionate, approach to Bogart and the legend he left behind. As Belmondo stares mystically at a photo of Bogart in Godard’s Breathless (1959), slowly exhaling cigarette smoke and rubbing his lip with his thumb, he murmurs wistfully, “Bogie …” and you can almost hear his director’s thoughts, echoed, for instance, in the words of the late André Bazin, probably France’s finest film critic. “Bogart is the man with a past,” he wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1957, a month after Bogart died. “When he comes into a film, it is already ‘the morning after’; sardonically victorious in his macabre combat with the angel, his face scarred by what he has seen, and his step heavy from all he has learned, having ten times triumphed over his death, he will surely survive for us this one more time…. The Bogartian man is not defined by his contempt for bourgeois virtues, by his courage or cowardice, but first of all by his existential maturity which little by little transforms life into a tenacious irony at the expense of death.”

  “He satirized himself a great deal,” said writer Betty Comden. Raymond Massey recalled an incident during the shooting of Action in the North Atlantic (1943): “The scene called for our doubles to jump from the bridge of a burning tanker into the water below, which was aflame with oil. Bogie turned to me and said, ‘My double is braver than yours.’ I said that wasn’t so, that my double was the braver man. Then Bogie looked at me and he said, ‘The fact is I’m braver than you are.’ I said that was nonsense. And the next thing I knew we did the damn stunt ourselves.” Massey chuckled. “I burned my pants off and Bogie singed his eyebrows.”

  To Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed him in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), Bogart’s toughness was a facade. “You’d be having dinner with him,” he said, “and someone would come over and you could just see the tough guy coming on.” And to Chester Morris: “He had a protective shell of seeming indifference. He wasn’t, but he did a lotta acting offstage. He liked to act tough, liked to talk out of the side of his mouth.” Writer-producer Nunnally Johnson said Bogart was convinced that people would have been disappointed if he didn’t act tough with them. “A fan came over during dinner one time,” said Johnson, “and Bogie told him to beat it. When the guy got back to his table I heard his companion say, quite happily, ‘See, I told ya he’d insult you.’” Johnson reflected a moment. “But he was a lot tougher than I would be and a lot tougher than most people I know. I remember one time Judy Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, were at his home. Now Luft was a big alley fighter and a good deal broader than Bogart. But Bogie got annoyed about something or other and he walked right over to Luft, who also was a good head taller, and nodded at Judy. ‘Would you take that dame out of this house,’ he said, ‘and never come back.’ Luft kind of looked at him a moment and then he took her out.” Johnson smiled. “Bogie took big risks.”

  “We’ll always have Paris …”: Humphrey Bogart with Ingrid Bergman in the Casablanca (1943) flashback sequence, during which their brief, passionate romance is touchingly evoked. One of the great accidental masterpieces in movies, this is the picture that made Bogart a romantic lead.

  Adlai Stevenson didn’t find him that way. “He wasn’t tough, not really,” said the ambassador (and two-time nominee of the Democratic Party for President). “He was, to me, a nonconformist. He had a cynicism without being unhealthy. He had great curiosity and an arch kind of skepticism.” And still another opinion: “He was a pushover,” said Lauren Bacall.

  “I never broke through his barrier,” critic John McClain said. “I don’t think anyone really got underneath. Bogart didn’t unburden himself to men. He loved to be in love and with a woman. I think he came closer to leveling with them than with anybody.” Bogart married four women during his fifty-seven years, each of them an actress: Helen Menken (1926), Mary Philips (1928), Mayo Methot (1938), and, in 1945, Lauren Bacall. “I think once a person was out, they were really out,” said Truman Capote, discussing the divorces. “He had emotional attachments.”

  Bogie and Baby, as the press called them, at the happiest of their happy endings, as they walk off together to the jazz accompaniment of Hoagy Carmichael (on the piano) at the conclusion of Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944), a sizzling romantic drama out of Hemingway (his novel) via Faulkner (he co-wrote the screenplay). Among the great American films.

  The Bogart-Methot marriage was a stormy one. “Their neighbors were lulled to sleep,” Dorothy Parker once said, “by the sounds of breaking china and crashing glass.” Johnson recalled that Methot once had Bogart followed. “She was very jealous and positive that he was playing around. But Bogie never had a weakness for dames. The only weakness he ever had was for a drink and a talk.” Johnson smiled. “Bogie soon found out a guy was tailing him, and he called up the fellow’s agency. ‘Hello, this is Humphrey Bogart,’ he said. ‘You got a man on my tail. Would you check with him and find out where I am.’”

  The first time Bogart met Betty Bacall she was coming out of director Howard Hawks’ office. She had made a test for Hawks, who had discovered her and first teamed the couple in To Have and Have Not (1945). “I saw your test,” Bogart said to her. “We’re gonna have a lotta fun together.” It was with Bacall that he had his only children, a boy named Steve, which is what she called Bogart in that first movie, and a girl named Leslie Howard, after the actor who had insisted that Bogart be cast in the film version of The Petrified Forest (1936), the movie that really sparked his picture career. “He missed her when they were apart,” Capote said. “He loved her. He used to talk a terrific line, but he was monogamous. Although that isn’t entirely true—he fell in love with Bacall while he was still married to Mayo.”

  Bogart put it this way: “I’m a one-woman man and I always have been. I guess I’m old-fashioned. Maybe that’s why I like old-fashioned women, the kind who stay in the house playing ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’.’ They make a man think he’s a man and they’re glad of it.”

  The stories go that Bogart was a heavy drinker, but Nunnally Johnson thinks otherwise. “I don’t think Bogie drank as much as he pretended to,” he said. “Many’s the time I was with him, the doorbell would ring, and he’d pick up his glass just to go answer the door. He couldn’t have been as good at his job if he drank as much as he was supposed to have.”

  But Bogart did drink. “I think the whole world is three drinks behind,” he used to say, “and it’s high time it caught up.” On one occasion he and a friend bought two enormous stuffed panda bears and took them as their dates to El Morocco. They sat them in chairs at a table for four and when an ambitious young lady came over and touched Bogart’s bear, he shoved her away. “I’m a happily married man,” he said, “and don’t touch my panda.” The woman brought assault charges against him, and when asked if he was drunk at four o’clock in the morning, he replied, “Sure, isn’t everybody?” (The judge ruled that since the panda was Bogart’s personal property, he could defend it.)

  But Bogart didn’t have to drink to start trouble. “He was an arrogant bastard,” said Johnson, grinning. “It’s kinda funny, this cult and everything. When he was alive, as many people hated him as loved him. I always thought of him as somewhat like Scaramouche.” Johnson chuckled. “What was it? ‘Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad….’ He’d start a skirmish and then sit back and wa
tch the consequences. Of course, there was nearly always something phony about the guy he was needling. Needle is the wrong word—howitzer would be more like it. The other fellow could use deflating, but it didn’t take all that artillery.”

  Bogart as detective Sam Spade in the John Huston adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1941), the first of six pictures Bogart did with Huston, and perhaps their most perfect and memorable.

  The original Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which Bogart initiated and which died with him, sprang from this distaste for pretense. “What is a Rat?” he once explained. “We have no constitution, charter or bylaws yet, but we know a Rat when we see one. There are very few Rats in this town. You might say that Rats are for staying up late and drinking lots of booze. We’re against squares and being bored and for lots of fun and being real Rats, which very few people are, but if you’re a real Rat, boy! Our slogan is, ‘Never rat on a Rat.’ A first principle is that we don’t care who likes us as long as we like each other. We like each other very much.”

  John McClain tells of the yacht club Bogart belonged to and of the people who rented the large house next door for a summer. They were the Earls and they Dressed for Dinner. The members of the club (who were never invited) used to peer over their fence, watching the lush festivities. McClain had been invited to a Sunday dinner and had asked if he might bring Bogart along since they would be together on his yacht over the weekend. As they docked, McClain reminded Bogart to dress for the occasion and went off to get ready himself. Bogart went into the club for a drink or two. “After a while,” McClain recalled, “Bogie announced to everyone in the club, ‘My dear friends, the Earls,’ he said, ‘are having an open house and they want you all to come.’ And into the Earl house comes Bogie followed by about thirty people, all wearing shorts and sport shirts and terrible sneakers.” McClain laughed. “It was pretty funny, actually, but I was furious at the time.”