Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  The movie was about the Murmansk run, a strategy that sent Allied convoys up the dangerous coast of Norway, bringing armaments to the Soviet Union. Lawson belonged to a Hollywood cell of the Communist Party and liked to address his fellow members on the value of propaganda. Esquire’s film critic had been a member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League; he remembered the Party line as articulated by Lawson: “As a writer try to get five minutes of the Communist doctrine … in every script you write. If you can, make the message come from the mouth of Gary Cooper or some other important star who is unaware of what he is saying; by the time it is discovered he is in New York and a great deal of expense will be involved to bring him back and reshoot the scene.” Lawson showed the way with Action in the North Atlantic.

  The first part fulfilled the promise of its title, with vivid battle scenes and colorful personalities. The North Star, one of the convoy’s largest ships, is torpedoed by a Nazi submarine. The by-the-book captain (Raymond Massey), his easygoing first officer (Humphrey), and a cross-section-of-America crew—O’Hara, Pulaski, and Abrams (Alan Hale, Dane Clark, and Sam Levene)—survive by clinging to a lifeboat and navigating through heavy seas. Rescued by the navy, they spend a brief holiday stateside, where Humphrey falls in love with a nightclub singer (Julie Bishop) and impulsively marries her before shipping out for another run to the USSR.

  The second part also featured explosions and shoot-outs with the enemy. Some of them were so graphic that stunt men were brought in to do the long-distance sequences of fire and explosions at sea. As they watched from the sidelines, Massey needled his colleague: “My double is braver than yours.” Humphrey rose to the bait: “He is like hell. My double is the bravest double there is.” The verbal war escalated until both actors decided to outperform each other by doing their own stunts. They got too near the heat: the Massey trousers caught fire, and the Bogart eyebrows were badly singed. “The horrified reaction we got from the director and producer made it worthwhile,” Massey impishly recalled. “If Humphrey had gotten hurt it would have cost Warners millions.”

  It was at the end that agitprop made a cameo appearance. With the captain severely wounded, the first officer takes charge, outwitting the maneuvers of a German submarine. Fighter planes appear overhead. Are they German? No, says a crewman, as he spots the red star on a fuselage: “They’re ours all right! Russian planes off the starboard quarter!” As the Americans safely dock in Murmansk, grateful Soviet troops warmly embrace their allies. They don’t speak English, but Alan Hale has picked up a little Russian. He explains, “Tovarich? That means friend!” Harmless enough, but untrue; in fact there had been no contact between the Allied sailors and the Soviets, except for a few carefully managed photo opportunities for propaganda purposes.

  None of this mattered much in 1943; after all, the USSR was a key U.S. ally in the fight against Nazi Germany. In the same year, Life magazine’s Russian issue described the Soviets as “one hell of a people” and Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, as merely “a national police similar to the FBI,” whose job was “tracking traitors.” And Warners proudly produced Mission to Moscow. Like the naïve book on which it was based, the film treated the Soviet invasion of Finland and Poland as “self-defense,” explained Stalin’s lethal purge trials as an attempt to get rid of Trotskyite fifth columnists, and romanticized the commissars as benign leaders of a happy and well-fed populace. In Time, James Agee said the movie was “almost describable as the first Soviet production to come from a major American studio … a great, glad, two-million-dollar bowl of canned borscht.”

  It would all matter very much in a few years, though, and even now a New Jersey congressman named J. Parnell Thomas was making plans to investigate Hollywood’s leftist writers and directors. During a 1938 investigation of the Federal Theater Project, the rising Republican star had made his position clear: “Practically every play presented under the auspices of the Project is sheer propaganda for Communism or the New Deal”—two groups he found virtually synonymous. Worse, in Thomas’s opinion, was the leftist dogma of too many Hollywood films. He would be quiet during the war, but his time was coming. Those on his wrong side would pay a price for their political views, and Humphrey Bogart would be swept along with them.

  ii

  After Action, Humphrey went on loan to Columbia for Sahara, another war film written by Lawson. This one was derived from a 1937 Russian film, The Thirteen, about intrepid Red Army soldiers hounded across the Gobi Desert by Royalist White Army troops. Lawson turned it into a tale of an American tank crew in Libya pursued by ruthless Germans (played, for the most part, by members of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Armored Division, deployed to the Mojave Desert for a month). Substituting for the Sahara was an arid region in California just north of the Mexican border. It was familiar turf to filmmakers; some twenty-two years before, Rudolph Valentino had crossed the same sands to woo an English maiden in The Sheik. The cast of Sahara stopped at a tourist hotel in the small town of Brawley, where there was nothing for most of them to do at night but imbibe adult beverages. Mayo Methot stayed with Humphrey, so in his case quarreling was added to drinking; the Battling Bogarts were at it again.

  During the day Humphrey was Sergeant Joe Gunn, tank commander. The sarge is in charge of a one-world crew, including a Sudanese NCO (Rex Ingram), an Italian prisoner of war (J. Carroll Naish), a downed enemy pilot (Kurt Krueger), and several Americans (Bruce Bennett, Dan Duryea, Lloyd Bridges). For Duryea, the role was a rare break from his long list of villains. Sahara, he recalled, was “a picture which practically nobody remembers my being in; one of the few pictures I didn’t play a heel and maybe for that reason.”

  But people remembered Humphrey in that picture. If he was too old for the role of a wartime noncom, no one noticed it. Asked where he hails from, Sergeant Gunn replies, “No place, just the army,” and no one doubted it. When he outwitted the thirst-crazed Germans, after taking some severe losses, the victory rang true. Still, off-screen, the time was far from happy. Humphrey’s relationship with fellow actors was convivial enough; in retrospect Kurt Krueger said he “couldn’t have been more outgoing.” The German refugee also recalled one of the few pleasant conversations with Mayo ever recorded. One morning the two shared a ride from the hotel to the location. Mayo cradled a thermos in her lap, and Krueger asked her why she was bringing coffee when there was always a pot brewing on the set. She responded with a loud peal of laughter. “Coffee? Hell no! Bogie needs his ice-cold Martinis.”

  Because Sahara was an all-male film, Mayo had no reason to be jealous of Humphrey’s current project. She was argumentative by nature, however, and held her alcohol badly. Night after night she lit into Humphrey, sometimes for no reason at all; he seemed to set her off merely by being present. Many evenings, those on the same floor of the hotel heard the sound of broken glass and the crash of furniture. Humphrey’s disposition was not sweetened by a break in filming, when he was assigned to appear in Warners’ narcissistic, studio-plugging Thank Your Lucky Stars. The documentary was shot in Burbank, and the time away from the desert should have provided some surcease from the heat, and from Mayo’s tantrums. But while the movie appeared to acknowledge Humphrey’s star status, it actually served to humiliate him. He and S. Z. Sakall, the jowly waiter in Casablanca, perform a skit in which he snarls: “I’m talking to you, Fatso,” but shrinks from a fight when Sakall calls him a chiseler and shoves him away. An onlooker comments, “Let the old man bulldoze you, eh?” Humphrey grumbles, “Yes, that ain’t like me. Gee, I hope none of my movie fans hear about this.” The sound track plays the Disney song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” as Humphrey turns up his collar and slinks off. In his study of New York leading men, City Boys, historian Robert Sklar rightly concludes that “Warner Bros. wanted a Bogart who could be bulldozed.”

  Back on the set, Humphrey tried hard to maintain professional standards, but on certain mornings he was manifestly hungover and unprepared. On those occasions he would pick a fight with Sahara
director Zoltan Korda, complaining about the dialogue he was required to speak. After the filming was done Korda, who liked to maintain cordial relationships with his cast, complained about Humphrey’s behavior to Bruce Bennett. “Don’t you realize what was going on?” Bennett inquired. “He was learning his lines.”

  Some of his best lines from that time were unscripted and unfilmed. Mayo had no problems with the Sahara personnel, but thought Humphrey might be seeing someone when he wasn’t on the set. She decided to hire a private eye. That worthy shadowed her husband for several days—apparently with the ineptitude of a Wilmer Cook. Humphrey spotted the shamus early on, guessed that he worked for the biggest detective agency in Los Angeles, called the office, and left a message: “Hello, this is Humphrey Bogart. You got a man on my tail. Would you check with him and find out where I am?”

  When the Bogarts returned to Hollywood, Humphrey hosted a dinner for the film’s military adviser, Colonel Reinicke, and his wife, as well as for several other officers and their wives. It took place at a Hollywood restaurant, and all went well over cocktails. As the meal progressed, though, Mayo got redder and redder. Without any warning she turned on her husband: “Goddam 4-F shirking bastard!” Humphrey tried to quiet her. “Don’t tell me to shut up, you neutral 4-F creep!” she yelled, and ran off. Embarrassed but game, Humphrey invited the guests back to his house for a nightcap. As they entered he advised them, “Mayo is here somewhere. If you say anything about her make it complimentary. She’ll come out in due time.” The Marines followed orders, loudly overpraising her beauty and her wardrobe, and raving about the house. Sure enough, Mayo emerged—from behind a couch, mad drunk, grumbling and cursing until the uncomfortable guests excused themselves and headed back to base.

  If Sahara had showcased the gritty and honorable Bogart, Warners had something else in mind for his return, assigning him the lead in Pentacle, eventually retitled Conflict. It was the story of a murder, but the central topic—the matrimonial hell at the movie’s center—hit too close to home. Humphrey wanted no part of it or in it. He planned to go straight into Passage to Marseilles, a war movie that would reunite him with the vital center of Casablanca, Michael Curtiz, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Claude Rains, and Helmut Dantine. The news went around Warners in an hour: Humphrey refused to appear in Conflict. Jack Warner was in no mood to argue; he had made Bogart, and by God he could break him. He roared, he pressured, he cajoled; one telegram read DEAR HUMPHREY, YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS; AM DEPENDING ON YOU AS THE REGULAR GUY YOU ARE. Nothing worked. Humphrey remained adamant: “I’m sorry, Jack,” he told his boss, “I just can’t do it.” Humphrey’s agent, Sam Jaffe, intervened, begging him to do just this one picture as a personal favor. The answer was no. He remained inflexible, and might well have gone on suspension or lost the starring role in Passage to Marseilles to Jean Gabin. Warner was planning to carry out one threat or the other. But on June 3, 1943, just as he was about to take action, the New York Times carried a tragic announcement: NAZIS HIT AIRLINE; LESLIE HOWARD AMONG 17 MISSING.

  The British actor had been on a goodwill tour of Portugal and Spain, sent there by his government in hopes of persuading English-speaking citizens of the neutral nations to aid Britain in its hour of need. Perhaps he had also been gathering intelligence; 10 Downing Street had no comment. It was Howard’s misfortune to catch a flight on the Ibis, an unarmed BOAC carrier, on the very day that Winston Churchill was also returning to London. German spies learned of the prime minister’s journey, but didn’t know which plane he had boarded. A Luftwaffe squadron was taking no chances. Two hundred miles off the coast of Spain, the German planes shot down the undefended Ibis in cold blood. Speculation about the passengers’ last few seconds was Topic A the next day. The New York Times confirmed the rumors: “It was believed in London that the Nazi raiders had attacked on the outside chance that the Prime Minister might be among the passengers.”

  The fatal case of mistaken identity sent chills through the country and traumatized Hollywood. The stuff of spy pictures turned out to be all too real. Humphrey hadn’t been in touch with Howard for quite a while; both actors were burdened by crammed schedules. Yet the man who had been responsible for his first big break was never far from Humphrey’s mind and the loss was irreparable. The starch went out of him. Demoralized and melancholy, he let Warner know that he would do Conflict after all. What the hell; life was too short to make a federal case out of a lousy movie.

  iii

  Humphrey and Mayo made a point of telling everyone on the set of Conflict that they had just passed their fifth wedding anniversary. The Bogarts showed Alexis Smith, Sydney Greenstreet, and other cast members the anniversary presents they had given each other: a hand-carved chess set and monogrammed board for Humphrey, gold earrings for Mayo. The celebration was for display purposes only; there had been no lull in the Bogarts’ conjugal war.

  Humphrey had quietly begun to seek the company of other women, including his ex-wife Helen Menken and his personal hairdresser, a spirited little brunette named Verita Thompson. In her memoir, Bogie and Me, Thompson writes of their lengthy affair. Her marriage was also unhappy, but Thompson’s husband was conveniently away in the service, and they would meet at her place in Burbank. “Often he’d spend the night,” she recalled, “usually leaving for the studio at around five in the morning.” Those were the occasions when Mayo “had driven him from the house with a barrage of bottles, dishes, pots and pans, and drunken screams.” Clearly Mayo had descended from alcoholism and neuroses into full-time instability. Humphrey had seen mental illness up close, in his mother’s long-ago summer outbursts and in his sister’s unshakeable postpartum depression. It reminded him of bad times, and he backed away. Rationalizing his conduct, he told a friend, “My wife is an actress. She’s a clever actress. It just so happens she’s not working right now. When an actress isn’t working she’s got to have scenes to play. And I’ve got to give her cues.” Mayo may have been beyond ordinary therapy by this time; in any case she never received the psychiatric counsel she needed and the marriage rapidly headed for its final, fatal crash.

  Meantime, there was one last war movie to be made. If ever there was proof of Thomas Wolfe’s warning that you can’t go home again, it was Passage to Marseille. The film was based on the novel Men Without Country by Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall, best-selling authors of Mutiny on the Bounty. Encouraged by the Warners front office, screenwriters Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt attempted to produce a Gallic version of Rick Blaine. In Passage, Humphrey plays Jean Matrac, a French newspaper editor framed for a murder he didn’t commit. Railroaded to Devil’s Island, he shares a room with other prisoners, among them Lorre and Dantine. Each man has a tale to tell, and so begins the ungainly narrative, with flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, and flashbacks within those flashbacks. Though Matrac is initially as cynical as Rick Blaine, he evolves into a patriot, challenges a Nazi sympathizer (Greenstreet), makes his escape, and joins the Free French air force. Warner Bros. had always been known for violent, over-the-top scenes; toward the end, Matrac has an under-the-bottom confrontation. He trains his machine gun on a group of German airmen, just as they wave their hands in a gesture of surrender. He pulls the trigger and kills every one of them. This was more than propaganda; it was a war crime, and the footage was excised when Passage was shown in European movie houses. Moreover, in Casablanca the audience never knows what’s going to happen to Rick; in Passage, they see Jean die in a bombing raid. What had begun as a terse, intriguing drama got weighed down with backstories, moral compromises, and an end that might have come from a World Federalist pamphlet. A letter from the deceased Jean Matrac begins: “My dear son, today you are five years old and your father has never seen you. But some day, in a better world, he will.” The missive goes on to envision a future “where youth may love without fear, and where parents may grow old with their children, and where men will be worthy of each other’s faith.”

  Somehow Humphrey got through t
his weighty, studio-bound film. There were times when he reeked of liquor early in the morning, but he never called in sick and frequently managed to give a good performance on the very first take. About the only joy he had while filming was conspiring with his drinking buddy Peter Lorre. As Curtiz prepared a scene, Humphrey would launch into a long and pointless story. The director paid him no mind and called for action. Dissatisfied with the result, he would have to reshoot. At this point, Peter would tell his own long, unfunny joke. Again Curtiz would film, and again the scene would turn out badly. It took him, said Peter, “about two days to find out that whenever he laughed he got the scene in one take and whenever he didn’t laugh he didn’t get a take. Two mornings later, Bogie and I, two staggering little figures, arrived on the big set. Mike saw us a block away and he started laughing like crazy in advance.”

  By the time Passage was finished, late in 1943, the tide of battle had turned and the Allies were on their way to the victory that Roosevelt and Churchill had planned for the previous year. Rommel’s troops were in retreat, Italy had surrendered, the Allies had bombed Hamburg and the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. The invasion of France could not be far off. Warners delayed the release of the film, hoping that American troops would occupy Marseilles en route to the liberation of Paris—thereby giving the studio a repeat of the public relations coup they had enjoyed with Casablanca. With Humphrey’s next picture still in preparation, the Bogarts signed up for an eleven-week USO tour of North Africa and Italy. Accompanied only by Don Cummings, a freelance actor with time on his hands, and Ralph Hark, an accordion player, the self-designated “Filthy Four” had no set act; they made it up as they went along. Humphrey played the tough guy for battle-weary GIs, quoting passages from his early films. Accompanied by Hark, the soldiers sang choruses of “As Time Goes By” and Mayo reprised “Without a Song,” a number she had sung in a 1929 Broadway musical, as well as a few tunes from the current hit parade.