Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  By now Humphrey was certain that he had no value, no skills worth developing, no way of distinguishing himself from the crowd of faceless veterans. And still he wasn’t fired. Alice Brady had no designs on him; she simply thought the young man was intelligent and trustworthy, and that there ought to be a place for him in her father’s business, somewhere, somehow. She enlisted her stepmother, actress Grace George, in the campaign to make Humphrey Bogart a stage manager. Why not? She argued. What was it but a sort of glorified gofer in charge of props and costumes? Her mother gave way. Together, the two women worked on Brady Sr. until he assented. But he mischievously added a proviso. Grace was about to tour in The Ruined Lady. If young Bogart was so good, why didn’t he stage-manage her company? To his surprise, Grace said she’d be pleased to have Humphrey aboard.

  The novice had no trouble with the usual requirements of the job. He saw to it that there was a place for everything, and everything was in its place. What threw him was the additional assignment: to earn his fifty-dollar weekly salary, the stage manager had to understudy every male role. As long as the actors stayed healthy, all was well. Humphrey did his job, and stayed so loose that he took to needling the juvenile lead, Neil Hamilton, about being overpaid for reciting a few lines and bowing at curtain time. Hamilton took the remarks in good spirits, but on the last night of the tour he arranged to succumb to a heavy cold. Humphrey called for a rehearsal, got into costume, and went onstage. “It was awful,” he remembered. “I knew all the lines of all the parts because I had heard them from out front about a thousand times. But I took one look at the emptiness where the audience would be that night and I couldn’t remember anything.”

  No one thought this would be the making of Humphrey Bogart—least of all Humphrey Bogart. He had never considered an acting career. You had to prepare long years for such a vocation. And you needed the gift for performance, for imitation, for climbing inside the skin of another person. He sensed no such gift, had attended no acting school, studied no master of the art, and couldn’t be anybody but himself. All the young man could do was keep from embarrassing himself and everyone else in the cast. That seemed unlikely.

  Watching this catastrophe in the making, Grace George charitably decided that she, too, was suffering from a sore throat, and the performance was canceled. Audiences would have to wait until the following year to see Humphrey Bogart make his stage debut.

  v

  An army veteran named Stuart Rose had started to call on Frances Bogart and, after winning the approval of Maud and Belmont, became a familiar presence around the house. Maud was otherwise occupied on Memorial Day 1921, so Stuart bought three tickets to a show at the Fulton Theater in Brooklyn and treated Frances and Belmont to Humphrey’s first performance. Humphrey, never the introspective sort, tended to dismiss his early roles as minuscule and insignificant. Yet even the smallest part seemed to encapsulate his time and place.

  In this long-forgotten play, for example, he did some doubling in crowd scenes, but had only one line: “Drinks for my lady and her most honored guests.” He delivered it dressed in livery and wearing thick yellow face powder. The corners of his eyes were marked with heavy black lines. It was the makeup man’s way of turning Humphrey into a Japanese butler. He was supposed to represent the customary image of the Mysterious Easterner of the 1920s: smiling, servile, and asexual, with a vaguely conspiratorial air.

  Stuart recalled his future brother-in-law entering tentatively, carrying a tray of cocktails and speaking with a stagy accent. “He said his line and he embarrassed me it was so bad.” Belmont leaned over and burbled, “The boy’s good, isn’t he?” Stuart choked out, “Yes, he is.” Yet Brady Sr. liked it well enough; a few months later he offered Humphrey a part in a melodrama. The actor was billed as H. D. Bogart, and completely ignored by the Broadway critics. Brady kept using him anyway. This was Broadway’s heyday; it had gone from prewar tawdry to postwar vibrant, alive with the dazzle of electric lights, theater marquees, and immense signs advertising Lucky Strike and Pepsi-Cola. French novelist Paul Morand cheerfully noted that in the theater district, “it is a glowing summer afternoon all night: one might almost wear white trousers and a straw hat. Theaters, night clubs, movie palaces, restaurants are all lighted at every porthole. Undiscovered prisms, rainbows squared.” Tourists flooded the place; optimism and booze were everywhere. There were often more than one hundred openings a year in the early 1920s, and an untried actor could be hidden in a large cast with no damage done to the overall production.

  Grace, Alice, and Bill Jr. kept working on Bill Sr., and in 1922, the impresario surrendered, casting Humphrey as the worthless “young sprig of the aristocracy” in Swifty. This melodrama starred Neil Hamilton and a soubrette named Frances Howard, fiancée of silent-film producer Sam Goldwyn. The part of a high-toned seducer was Humphrey’s most demanding role and Senior was taking no chances. One day he overheard his protégé asking the director, “Which way do I face—toward the audience or toward the other actors?” That was all Brady needed. In his view there were but two kinds of actors, professionals and bums, and he wanted everyone who worked for him to be a pro. During rehearsals he sat in the balcony, battering the sprig, shouting “What?” every time the actor failed to enunciate clearly. It was here that the distinctive Bogart delivery was born—the sudden rictus, the lips pulled back after a statement, the unique sibilance that sometimes made him sound tentative and boyish, and at other times gave him a vaguely malevolent air.

  Swifty was roundly panned. The bad news was conveyed to Humphrey by his mother the next day when she entered his room with the morning papers. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Maud briskly quoted the critics. Heywood Broun of the New York World had found the play “cheap and implausible,” and Alan Dale of the New York American said that Humphrey Bogart gave a “rather trenchant example of bad acting.” Most of the notices depressed Humphrey, but one angered him. That column he preserved, as if to toughen his resolve. For the rest of Humphrey’s life, Alexander Woollcott’s words occupied a central place in his scrapbook, turning yellow with the years. It read, “The young man who embodies the aforesaid sprig is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate.”

  Humphrey interpreted Woollcott’s words as a challenge, and urged Brady to give him bigger and better roles. Instead, the boss kept casting him in play after play as a juvenile wearing striped jacket and white ducks, vigorously entering with a racket or a cocktail in hand. Some journalists claimed to have heard Bogart make the hallowed inquiry, “Tennis anyone?,” among them Hearst columnist Louella Parsons and New York Post critic Richard Watts Jr. But no such documentary evidence exists. Humphrey did swear to Nathaniel Benchley that he had said “It’s forty—love outside—anyone care to watch?” and claimed to have spoken every stage cliché except “Give me the ball, coach, and I’ll get you a touchdown.”

  Actually, the role of a sprig was a technical necessity. In the era of large casts, playwrights often needed to clear the stage to get to the next scene. Hence the device of the young man who invites everyone outside to watch a game or have some tea. Quite a few of these male ingenues were gay and made no attempt to hide their inclinations. This was not only the New York theater with its reputation for liberality, it was also the 1920s with its new emphasis on non traditional lifestyles and deportment. Yet even the tolerant world of Broadway found itself confused by the jumble of gender roles being pushed by fashion and music. Eventually those feelings erupted in the novelty number “Masculine Women, Feminine Men”:

  Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot.

  Now we don’t know who is who, or even what’s what!

  For all his rebellions against Maud and Belmont, for all his drunken sprees and surly postures, Humphrey could not escape the central fact of his life. He was the scion of straitlaced parents whose roots were in another time. Their customs and attitudes may have become outmoded, but they were deeply ingrained in their son no matter how hard he tried to escape th
em. They showed in his upright carriage and in his careful manner of speaking, in his courtesy to women and frank dealing with men. He came to recognize that he gave “the impression of a Nineteenth Century guy,” no matter how hard he tried to be au courant. But it worked in his favor. In the 1920s many dramas and comedies looked back to the Edwardian era. Humphrey became a favorite of casting directors during the time William Brady Sr. kept him out of plays he regarded as “Grade A.”

  At last, in 1923, Senior finally rewarded Humphrey with a major part in Meet the Wife. The comedy starred two highly polished professionals, Clifton Webb and Mary Boland, and gave them clever lines and situations. For the first time Humphrey read an unqualified, if brief, approval of his own work. “Bogart,” said the World review, “is a handsome and nicely mannered reporter, which is refreshing.” Humphrey was in his first bona fide Broadway hit; Wife ran thirty weeks. With the guarantee of a steady salary, a modicum of fame, and the knowledge that he only had to work three hours out of every twenty-four, he began to lose his bearings.

  With his date of choice—and he changed women nearly as often as he changed shirts—Humphrey visited the Cotton Club in Harlem, heard Texas Guinan shout “Hello, suckers!” to her patrons, watched Jimmy Durante caper at the Dover Club, and drank at Chumley’s in the Village before heading home at sunrise. This kind of behavior led to the inevitable hangovers, and one evening, shortly before the close of the long run, he showed up onstage with glazed eyes and liquor-scented breath. He groped for his lines and came up empty, leaning against a wall to regain his composure. Boland was forced to improvise a monologue on the spot. At length Humphrey recalled his line and they got through the rest of the act without further incident. But as soon as the curtain fell she rounded on him: “Get this, Bogart—you’ll never work in another play with me!”

  It was shameful conduct, and he knew it. There were but two kinds of actors, professionals and bums. And Humphrey Bogart had just behaved like a bum. He resolved never to repeat the incident, and went at his next assignment with the self-discipline of an old trouper. In the 1924 season, Nerves, the story of a flying squadron going from the halls of Yale to the skies of France, was given a first-class production by Bill Brady Jr. Co-written by the poet Stephen Vincent Benét, it featured a set by the gifted designer Jo Mielziner and starred a group of emerging actors. They included Humphrey, Mielziner’s brother Kenneth, who had changed his last name to MacKenna, and a pretty female lead named Mary Philips. Alas, in the theater as elsewhere, timing is everything, and Nerves could not have chosen a more inauspicious moment to open. The night before, the antiwar comedy-drama What Price Glory (“Stop the blood! Stop the blood!”) had debuted at the Plymouth Theater and used up all the oxygen on Broadway.

  Nerves expired twenty-three days later, but not before Humphrey received the best notices of his career. In Heywood Broun’s opinion Humphrey Bogart gave “the most effective performance” in an unsatisfactory play. The Times critic agreed: Bogart “was dry and fresh, if that be possible.” The notices went into Humphrey’s scrapbook, and the judgments, he recalled, went to his “badly swelled head.” In a key scene Philips was supposed to walk away silently as Humphrey spoke. “I noticed,” he said, “that she was putting a lot of that in her walk.” So much, in fact, that he could feel the audience’s eyes leave him in order to follow her. He confronted Mary and was met with a saucy reply: “Suppose you try to stop me.” He didn’t accept the challenge because “while I was talking I was suddenly aware that here was a girl with whom I could very easily fall in love.”

  vi

  He put Mary Philips out of his mind the moment the show closed. But that was typical of Humphrey in those days. Freud’s influence was only beginning to be felt in the 1920s, yet it didn’t take a psychoanalyst to see how a cold, remote mother could shape her son’s attitude toward the female of the species. Maud’s influence, coupled with the hell-with-it mind-set of the flappers, kept him from caring deeply about women—an indifference that seemed to color his general outlook.

  So Humphrey’s friends were astonished by his next move: he forsook acting and took a step backward to stage-managing. The action was motivated by fear and shame. In the first place, he had never quite shaken off his stage fright and wondered whether he had it in him to become a professional player. In the second place, he had been smarting ever since his disgraceful behavior in Meet the Wife. Playing the good soldier in William Brady’s outfit might help everyone forget—or at least forgive—his missteps.

  It turned out to be a wise move. Brady expressed his gratitude early and often. For the touring company of Drifting, headed by his daughter, Alice, had just run into trouble. Alice was pregnant and doctors predicted the child would be born prematurely. Just how premature they would find out on a Saturday night, immediately after the show. The Sunday performance was canceled, giving the staff of Drifting two days to find a new female lead. The following afternoon an assistant stage manager ran through the lines onstage with one actress, while in an office upstairs Humphrey did the same thing with another. Her name was Helen Menken; after a brief consultation, the two men decided that she was by far the better candidate.

  Menken had to memorize the lines overnight, and she went through the blocking on Monday. Her opening was a disaster. Drifting had eight scene changes, and she could hardly be blamed for colliding with the scenery a few times. One divider actually fell on her. Somehow she managed to get through the night without blowing a line. After the final bows, though, she aimed a stream of invective at Humphrey. He conceded that Miss Menken had done her best under arduous conditions, but then again, so had he. His protestations only seemed to make her more irritable. She got louder and hotter. “I guess I shouldn’t have done it,” he remembered ruefully, “but I booted her. She, in turn, belted me and ran to her dressing room to cry.” Willful, short-tempered, sharp-tongued—in brief, Humphrey’s kind of woman.

  Within a week they were dating; within a month they had taken out a wedding license. Smitten though they were, no nuptials followed. Helen was older and more established and drew a higher salary than Humphrey. That would never do. The last thing he wanted was a repeat of his parents’ financial situation. On this point he stood firmly with Belmont: the husband, not the wife, should be the breadwinner. To that end, Humphrey went back to acting. Stuart Rose was to remember that his brother-in-law had no innate gift for performance. What he had was determination. He would make himself into a leading man by dint of “observation, integrity and brains. He had a very strong character.” While Helen returned to the road, Humphrey moved on to Hell’s Bells, a comedy co-starring Shirley Booth, one of the critics’ favorite actresses. The comedy got so-so reviews but enjoyed a decent run. Better still, from Humphrey’s point of view, the critic for the American said that his part was “gorgeously acted.” That notice helped him get his next assignment.

  Mary Boland (“Get this, Bogart”) personified the show business adage “I’ll never speak to you again—until I need you.” She interviewed player after player for her new show, Cradle Snatchers, a slambang farce about three society wives who acquire their own private gigolos. They also acquire a hideout in a bordello, only to find their husbands seeking comfort at the same place. No actor seemed to have the right combination of good looks and discernible sense of humor. At the end of the day Boland turned to her producer and sighed, “Oh, all right then. Get Bogart. I know it’s what you have in mind.”

  It was indeed. Boland said nothing about Humphrey’s gaffe in Meet the Wife, nor did he, and they got along splendidly through the long and lucrative run. Everyone got good notices, but Amy Leslie, who covered New York for the Chicago Tribune, only had eyes for Humphrey. She said he was “as young and handsome as Valentino … elegant in comedy … as graceful as any of our best actors.” Whatever private doubts Humphrey had about his ability vanished forever. He had found a vocation—or a vocation had found him. He was no longer one of the postwar drifters bereft of purpose or directio
n. All right, he acknowledged, this was unplanned; he had been the beneficiary of a series of happy accidents. So what? The important thing was the Latin phrase he had learned in prep school, even though he had learned little else there: Carpe diem. Seize the day. Humphrey forswore stage-managing without a backward glance and thereafter devoted himself to three main pursuits: the theater, romance, and alcohol.

  The 1925–26 season was to have a profound significance for Humphrey. While he basked in critical appreciation, a versatile, twinkling Briton, Leslie Howard, was starring in The Green Hat, and a short, dynamic ex-hoofer named James Cagney was featured in Outside Looking In. Along the Rialto three actresses were hard at work: Helen Menken in Makropoulos Secret, Mary Philips in The Wisdom Tooth, and Mayo Methot in Alias the Deacon. All would mold the Bogart image; all were regulars at midtown speakeasies. Humphrey’s favorite was Tony’s, a joint patronized by the Broadway elite. Among the regulars were columnist Heywood Broun and producer Mark Hellinger, who became a close friend. Also present was the influential critic, gossip, and show-off Alexander Woollcott—the one who had witheringly described Humphrey’s debut as “inadequate.” He was accorded a wary tip of the Bogart fedora.

  By now Stuart Rose had married Humphrey’s sister Frances, and Humphrey thought about heading for the altar himself. In theory Helen Menken would make an ideal bride. In reality, however, too much had happened since their whirlwind engagement. During the past year, Helen had become a Broadway diva. Currently starring in the hit play Seventh Heaven, she received nightly ovations at the theater, and then again when she entered the lobby at her place of residence, the Gramercy Park Hotel. Again Humphrey had visions of Maud and Belmont redivivus. What to do? In wine, Humphrey confessed to Bill Brady Jr. that he really didn’t want to get married. Bill knew the politics of theater and journalism far better than his friend. Alexander Woollcott, who had no romantic interest in women, was nonetheless an admirer and close friend of Helen’s. Bill gave it to his buddy straight: he was in too deep now, and if he didn’t marry Helen he’d never work on Broadway again; Alex would take care of that. Bill urged Humphrey to consider the situation: with Helen, he could crack the big time; without her he was, face it, one more superannuated juvenile.