Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  “He could be very wrong, too,” said Nathaniel Benchley. “One time at ‘21’ I was standing at the bar with a couple of friends and Bogie got up from his table and came over. ‘Are you a homosexual?’ he said to one of them, just like that. The fellow looked rather taken aback and said he didn’t see that it was any of his business. ‘Well, are you?’ said Bogie. ‘Come on, we got a bet going at the table.’ The fellow said, ‘Since you ask, no.’ I think Bogie could feel he’d been wrong and he turned to the other guy with us and asked him if he was a homosexual. The guy said no. He asked me and I said no and then he said, ‘Well, I am,’ and kinda minced away. He knew he’d been wrong.”

  A few weeks after Bogart’s death, Peter Ustinov said, in a speech: “Humphrey Bogart was an exceptional character in a sphere where characters are not usually exceptional. To a visitor hot from the cold shores of England, he would put on an exaggerated Oxford accent and discuss the future of the ‘British Empah’ as though he wrong-headedly cared for nothing else in the wide world. His aim was to shake the newcomer out of his assumed complacency by insults that were as shrewdly observed as they were malicious…. The way into his heart was an immediate counterattack in a broad American accent, during which one assumed a complicity between him and his bête noire, Senator McCarthy, in some dark scheme…. It was in the character of the man that he smiled with real pleasure only when he had been amply repaid in kind.”

  Capote would go along with that: “The turning point in our friendship—the beginning really—was during Beat the Devil (1954). Bogie and John Huston and some others, they were playing that game—you know the one, what d’ya call it?—you take each other’s hand across a table and try to push the other’s arm down. Well, it just happens that I’m very good at that game. So, anyway, Bogie called over, ‘Hey, Caposy.’ That’s what he called me, ‘Caposy.’ He said, ‘C’mon, Caposy, let’s see you try this.’ And I went over and I pushed his arm down. Well, he looked at me … He had such a suspicious mind, he was sure that Huston had cut off my head and sewed it onto someone else’s body. ‘Let’s see you do that again,’ he said. And again I pushed his arm down. So he said, ‘Once more,’ and I said I would only if we bet a hundred dollars, which we did. I won again and he paid me, but then he came over and he started sort of semi-wrestling with me. It was something they did. He was crushing me and I said, ‘Cut that owat,’ and he said, ‘Cut that owat.’ I said, ‘Well, do,’ and he said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because you’re hurting me.’ But he kept right on squeezing, so I got my leg around behind him and pushed and over he went. He was flat on his can looking up at me. And from then on we were very good friends.”

  “Bogie’s needling tactics were quite calculated,” Johnson explained. “I had lunch with him and Betty at Romanoff’s one time and she was giving him hell about some row at a party. He’d provoked it, of course. ‘Someday somebody’s gonna belt you,’ she said, and he said, ‘No, that’s the art of it—taking things up to that point and then escaping.’”

  In 1947, Bogart led a march to Washington to protest the investigations of the Un-American Activities Committee. Some people labeled him a pinko. He didn’t like that. “I am an American,” he said. Bogart’s political freethinking was considered dangerous in Hollywood. In 1952, however, he campaigned most actively for Stevenson for President. “He never seemed to give a damn what people thought or said,” Stevenson recalled. “And it was quite perilous in those days to be a Democrat, especially one partisan to me. He was disdainful about anybody trying to muscle about in a free country.”

  “He wasn’t an extremist in anything,” said Bacall, “except telling the truth. You had to admire Bogie. He always said what he thought. ‘God-damnit,’ he used to say, ‘if you don’t want to hear the truth, don’t ask me.’”

  “That’s true,” Johnson said. “Everything he did was honest. He used to say, ‘What’s everybody whispering about? I’ve got cancer!’ He’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s not a venereal disease.’”

  Bogart also said that the only point in making money is “so you can tell some big shot to go to hell.” And: “I have politeness and manners. I was brought up that way. But in this goldfish-bowl life, it is sometimes hard to use them.”

  His widow thinks it was more than just good manners Bogart had. Finally, she’ll tell you, “He was an old-fashioned man, a great romantic. And very emotional. He would cry when a dog died. You should have seen him at our wedding, tears streaming down his face. He told me that he started thinking about the meaning of the words. He was tough about life and totally uncompromising, but I remember he went to see Steve at nursery school and when he saw him sitting at his little desk, he cried.”

  Alistair Cooke met the Bogarts on the Stevenson campaign train and he remembered sitting with them one afternoon and saying that, of course, Stevenson wouldn’t win. “‘What!?’ said Bogie, astounded. ‘Not a prayer, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Why, you son of a bitch,’ Betty said, ‘that’s a fine thing to say.’ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m a reporter. You’re the lieutenants.’ We bet ten dollars on it and when Stevenson lost he paid it to me. But he didn’t really think I’d take it. You know what he said? ‘It’s a hell of a guy who bets against his own principles.’”

  Cooke commented on this Bogart trait in an article he wrote for The Atlantic Monthly (May 1957): “A touchy man who found the world more corrupt than he had hoped … he invented the Bogart character and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like a glove…. From all … he was determined to keep his secret: the rather shameful secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an idealist.”

  Other friends detected a similar quality in Bogart. Joe Mankiewicz called it, “A sadness about the human condition. He had a kind of eighteenth-century, Alexander Pope nature. I think he would have made a superb Gatsby. His life reflected Gatsby’s sense of being an outsider.” Stevenson found “a wistful note in him, as there often is in thinking people. He was much more profound than one might think.” And Capote called him lost. “It was his outstanding single characteristic—that something almost pathetic. Not that he would ever ask for sympathy, far from it. It just always seemed to me as though he were permanently lonely. It gave him a rather poetic quality, don’t you think?”

  This secret inner world of Humphrey Bogart was reflected in his passion for sailing and his love for the Santana, his boat, on which he went off whenever he could, accompanied by a few friends. They used to drink Drambuies and play dominoes or just sail. He had learned early about the sea, having left school (at their request) at seventeen and joined the Navy. It was on the troopship Leviathan that he received the injury that permanently scarred his upper lip. “Sailing. That was the part of him no one could get at,” Capote said. “It wasn’t anything materialistic. It was some kind of inner soul, an almost mystical hideaway.”

  If the Motion Picture Herald’s annual Fame Poll of the Top Ten movie stars can be trusted, it appears that Bogart’s peak years of popularity were 1943–1949, during and just after World War II. Cooke explained it this way: “He was … a romantic hero inconceivable in any time but ours…. When Hitler was acting out scripts more brutal and obscene than anything dreamed of by Chicago’s North Side or the Warner Brothers, Bogart was the only possible antagonist likely to outwit him and survive. What was needed was no Ronald Colman, Leslie Howard or other knight of the boudoir, but a conniver as subtle as Goebbels. Bogart was the very tough gent required, and to his glory he was always, in the end, on our side.” He didn’t get his Oscar, however, until 1952 (for The African Queen), and popped up on the Top Ten again in 1955, just a little more than a year before he died.

  Bogart said, “It took fifteen years to make us personalities. Gable and Cooper can do anything in a picture, and people would say, ‘Oh, that’s just good old Clark.’”

  “His great basic quality,” said Ustinov, “was a splendid roughness. Even when perfectly gro
omed, I felt I could have lit a match on his jaw…. He knew his job inside out, and yet it was impossible not to feel that his real soul was elsewhere, a mysterious searching instrument knocking at doors unknown even to himself….”

  Perhaps this is what Bogart’s admirers sense. “There was something about him that came through in every part he played,” said Bacall. “I think he’ll always be fascinating—to this generation and every succeeding one. There was something that made him able to be a man of his own and it showed through his work. There was also a purity, which is amazing considering the parts he played. Something solid, too. I think as time goes by we all believe less and less. Here was someone who believed in something.”

  “Like all really great stars,” said director George Cukor, “he had a secret.” Cukor never worked with him, but they were friends. “You never really know him altogether. He also had boldness of mind, freedom of thought—a buccaneer. I think these young people haven’t seen him,” he went on, trying to explain the cult. “They’re simply rediscovering him. After all, Bogie had class.”

  “The average college student would sooner identify with Bogart than, say, Sinatra, don’t you think?” said Mankiewicz. “He had that rather intellectual disrespect for authority. Also, I don’t think anyone ever really believed that Bogart was a gangster—that’s what fascinated people. Bogart never frightened them.”

  Bogart (with Gloria Grahame on bed) as the strangely mercurial and occasionally violent screenwriter suspected of murder in Bogart’s own production, In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray; writer-star Louise Brooks wrote that of all the actor’s roles, this one most reminded her of the Bogie she knew.

  “It’s angry youth,” Chester Morris said. “They’re cheering for the heavy today. Everything must be nonconformist. They’d also like to do the kind of things he did. He was a forerunner of James Bond.” Benchley: “He’s a hero without being a pretty boy.”

  “Could it be anything as simple as sex appeal?” Cooke wondered. “He had an image of sophisticated virility and he projected it remarkably well. And with such humor. At last, he had such style that it doesn’t wither, it doesn’t age, it doesn’t date. Like Billie Holiday.”

  “I think Robin Hood has always been attractive,” said Adlai Stevenson.

  Before the adulation, there must be something to adulate. And this must be created. “If a face like Ingrid Bergman’s looks at you as though you’re adorable,” Bogart once said, “everybody does. You don’t have to act very much.” Raymond Chandler thought otherwise: “All Bogart has to do to dominate a scene is to enter it.” Evidently it wasn’t always that way. In 1922, playing one of his first stage roles, he was reviewed by Alexander Woollcott: “His performance could be mercifully described as inadequate.” But two years later, of another performance, Woollcott again: “Mr. Bogart is a young actor whose last appearance was recorded by your correspondent in words so disparaging that it is surprising to find him still acting. Those words are hereby eaten.” It would figure that Bogart often used to quote the first review but never the second.

  “‘Why, I’m a National Institution,’ he used to say,” Capote recalled. “He was very proud of his success and fame. But he was most serious about his acting. He thought of it as a profession, one that he was curious about, knew something about. After all, it was almost the sum total of his life. In the end, Bogart really was an artist. And a very selective one. All the gestures and expressions were pruned down and pruned down. One time I watched The Maltese Falcon with him and he sat there, muttering in that hoarse way, criticizing himself in the third person. ‘Now he’s gonna come in,’ he’d say. ‘Then he’s gonna do this and that’s where he does the wrong thing.’ I gathered during the silences that he liked it. It was braggadocio through silence.”

  Richard Brooks, director-writer of a couple of Bogart films, told me, “Humphrey Bogart could never equate the money he was making with what he was doing. He was constantly mocking himself. And that’s a good thing, you know what I mean?”

  Howard Hawks directed Bogart in his two most archetypal roles, as Harry (“Steve”) Morgan in To Have and Have Not and as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946). “He was extremely easy to work with,” Hawks said. “Really underrated as an actor. Without his help I couldn’t have done what I did with Bacall. Not too many actors would sit around and wait while a girl steals a scene. But he fell in love with the girl and the girl with him, and that made it easy.”

  Bogart used to say that an audience was always a little ahead of the actor. “If a guy points a gun at you,” he explained, “the audience knows you’re afraid. You don’t have to make faces. You just have to believe that you are the person you’re playing and that what is happening is happening to you.”

  Ustinov acted with Bogart once, in a comedy called We’re No Angels (1955). “Bogart had an enormous presence,” he said, “and he carried the light of battle in his eye. He wished to be matched, to be challenged, to be teased. I could see a jocular and quarrelsome eye staring out of the character he was playing into the character I was playing—rather as an experienced bullfighter might stare a hotheaded bull to precipitate action.”

  “When the heavy, full of crime and bitterness,” said Bogart, “grabs his wounds and talks about death and taxes in a husky voice, the audience is his and his alone.”

  This emotion, elicited so consciously from his movie audiences, ironically became a reality. His death was horribly, heartbreakingly in character. He died on January 14, 1957, of a cancer of the esophagus, and it had taken well over a year to kill him. “These days,” he said, “I just sit around and talk to my friends, the people I like.” Which is what he did.

  “I went to see him toward the end,” said Ambassador Stevenson. “He was very ill and very weak, but he made a most gallant effort to keep gay. He had an intolerance for weakness, an impatience with illness.”

  “I went a few times,” Capote said. “Most of his friends went, some almost every day, like Sinatra. Some were very loyal. He seemed to bring out the best in them all. He looked so awful, so terribly thin. His eyes were huge and they looked so frightened. They got bigger and bigger. It was real fear and yet there was always that gay, brave self. He’d have to be brought downstairs on the dumbwaiter and he’d sit and wait and wait for his martini. He was only allowed one, I think, or two. And that’s how we used to find him, smoking and sipping that martini.”

  During that time, his wife rarely left the house, though her friends and even Bogart urged her to go out more often. When someone asked why she had been out only six or seven times in ten months, Bogart replied: “She’s my wife and my nurse. So she stays home. Maybe that’s the way you tell the ladies from the broads in this town.”

  “He was quite a man, Bogart,” Brooks said admiringly. He was genuinely tough and he was honest. I remember a couple of weeks before he died he was still having guests and seeing friends in the afternoon. I went out to see him one day and found him sitting there as usual, drink in hand. After a while, he had a terrible coughing fit and he started vomiting blood. It was an awful thing to see. I got up and started to leave the room till it was over. And Bogie looked up at me and said, ‘What’s a matter, Dick, can’t you take it?’”

  “He went through the worst and most agonizing pain any human can take,” said Dr. Maynard Brandsma. “I knew this and when I’d see him I’d ask, ‘How is it?’ Bogie would always answer simply, ‘Pretty rough.’ He never complained and he never whimpered. I knew he was dying and during the last weeks I knew he knew it, too.”

  “I saw him twenty-three days before he died,” said Cukor. “He couldn’t come downstairs anymore and he was heavily sedated. He kept closing his eyes. Still he’d be telling jokes and asking to hear the gossip. But his voice was the wonder. That marvelous voice. It was absolutely alive. It was the last thing that died.”

  Humphrey Bogart is detective Philip Marlowe, and Lauren Bacall plays his client’s daughter, whom he falls for, as Bog
art did for Bacall, though they were not yet married while making this mesmerizing 1946 Howard Hawks adaptation (with script assistance by William Faulkner) of Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep; the quintessential detective picture and among the three most archetypal Bogart performances.

  Upon his death, most of the newspaper reports were similar. Quite a few of them told it this way: “Usually he kissed his wife Lauren Bacall and said, ‘Good night.’ But according to Dr. Michael Flynn, this time he put his hand on her arm and murmured in his familiar brusque fashion, ‘Good-bye, kid.’” In other words, a Bogart death scene. He had walked through seventy-five movie nights for the world, and it would be impossible now to change the image or alter a legend that had really just begun.

  Fortyyears after I wrote most of that piece, Bogart is at the top of the list of Hollywood legends. A couple of years ago when I sat down again with Lauren Bacall, she would speak more intimately about Bogart, and it became clear that she was still as much in love with him as ever. The last time we had talked at any length was only seven years after Bogart had died, and she had smiled softly quite often with the slightly disconnected yet direct look in her eyes of stoic heartbreak—as though seven years had been no time at all. In 2002, as she spoke, forty-five years since his death didn’t seem so long ago either.

  Their love affair had begun with laughter between takes on To Have and Have Not. Bogart, being aware of her terrible nervousness on this first picture, would kid around with her, crack jokes to break her up. He succeeded. Before she felt any emotional attraction toward Bogart, she could laugh easily with him, and indeed credits this with making the “chemistry” between them even “more pronounced—it was terrific.” That’s an understatement: To Have and Have Not is unique by virtue of being the most vividly captured romantic connection between two stars—courtship to capitulation—in the sound era. (Only Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in the silent Flesh and the Devil come close.) The irony is that this is exactly what Howard Hawks had counted on by creating a character and molding an actress into what he would describe to me in the sixties as “an American Dietrich.”* Hawks’ notion was to take Bogart, the “most insolent” star on the screen, and put a young woman beside him who was “more insolent” than he was. As Bacall has said, her performance in the movie, the way she was presented, was all part of Hawks’ fantasy. In his own way, Bacall came to realize, Hawks was shaping her to be his ideal woman and wanted also (though unstated) to have an affair with her during the film. But the electricity he had bet on was so hot that Howard didn’t have a prayer.