“I really do not feel that Bogart’s condition can be straightened out overnight since he has been drinking for approximately three weeks and it is not only the liquor, but also the mental turmoil regarding his domestic life that is entering into this situation.…”
On an extended visit, Natalie Bacal learned of her daughter’s new crush. She, too, raised hell, and not only because Humphrey was married and twenty-five years Lauren’s senior. Natalie thought the young woman was acting like a starry-eyed love slave. One rainy night Humphrey called and asked Lauren to meet him. She dressed immediately. “You can’t jump every time he calls,” Natalie warned. “He’ll have no respect for you. Let him know that you won’t meet him any hour of the day or night. He’s taking advantage of you—it’s ridiculous.”
There was no way Lauren could honor her pledge to Hawks or obey her mother. She was far beyond smitten. So was Humphrey. The couple would take great pains to stay away from each other when the filming was done for the day, drive off in separate cars, and then, when they were away from prying eyes, park on a secluded street. He would come to her car and they would sit in the front seat, holding hands like a couple of schoolkids. On other occasions they were overheated and intimate, sometimes even during breaks on the set, closing the door of a dressing room and emerging half an hour later, disheveled but radiant.
There was a strong oedipal component to Lauren’s affection. “I wanted to give Bogie so much that he hadn’t had,” she acknowledged, “all the love that had been stored inside of me, all my life for an invisible father, for a man. I could finally think of allowing it to pour over this man and fill his life with laughter, warmth, joy—things he hadn’t had for such a long time, if ever.”
Those sentiments jibed with the longings of many American women. Their husbands and boyfriends were overseas, and they looked for the certainty and authority of their elders. In 1944, the most prominent men in military and political roles were father figures or even grandfather figures. In 1944, Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy Fleet, was sixty-six. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, was sixty-four. So was General George C. Marshall, army chief of staff. General George S. Patton, Third Army commander, was fifty-nine, as was Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. President Roosevelt, gearing up for his fourth national campaign, was sixty-two. Americans—particularly American women—needed to believe in these gray-haired leaders. So, in fact, did Humphrey. He endorsed FDR yet again, this time over the protests of Republicans who showered him with letters. The most aggressive were anonymous: “You cheap sissy—portrayer of gangster parts, have the asinine impudence to attempt to tell your superiors how to vote. You of the celluloid, stay in your film field.” “You contaminate the air of free America.” “Keep your personal opinions under your hat. You’ll stay in pictures longer and lose fewer fans.” When the Hollywood Reporter advised actors to stay out of political discussions, Humphrey sat down at his typewriter, set his opinions down, and arranged to have them printed in the Saturday Evening Post.
“I Stuck My Neck Out” made no attempt to be conciliatory. “When the ‘treat ’em nice so long as they stay in their sound stage cages and perform entertaining tricks but rap their noses when they come out of them’ school of thought finds a champion in a Hollywood motion picture trade paper, I think it is time for one of the ‘menagerie’ to speak up.” Humphrey urged actors to express themselves on any subject—with a great emphasis on politics. He thought it wrong “to be threatened with boycott of our screen performances because we spoke out for Franklin Roosevelt or Tom Dewey any more than we think it is right for German composers and painters to have their works destroyed because they don’t believe in Hitler’s Nazi philosophy.” Personally, he concluded, “I’m going to keep right on sticking my neck out, without worrying about its possible effect upon my career. I love doing it. You meet so many interesting people that way.”
Humphrey would have reason to regret that article in a few years. Right now, though, his moral indignation went down well. At forty-four he had found himself newly popular, along with the forty-four-year-old Spencer Tracy and the forty-seven-year-old Walter Pidgeon. Even the thirty-seven-year-old John Wayne had begun to play tough, paternal roles, usually of a grizzled soldier grown old before his time, leading baby-faced GIs into battle.
One day this new generation of actors would redefine the male image, though no one predicted it at the time. As Jeanine Basinger notes in The Star Machine, “The effect of World War II on shaping the ‘new hero’ as a ‘sensitive’ male has never been fully explored.” In later years credit was given to the Actors Studio for producing a new kind of leading man—Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marlon Brando, et al. “Who remembers that the type was already in place, thanks to World War II having brought us Van Johnson, Marshall Thompson, Dane Clark, Lon McCallister, Robert Walker?” For when the men went to war, the boys began to take over. They needed girls next door to romance, and younger sidekick actors to hang out with and younger parents to have raised them. “Once the ‘boy star’ emerged,” concludes Basinger, “he would not go away.”
For the time being, however, the Bogart generation was still in control. Under those conditions, the romance of a young woman in the last of her teenage years and a thrice-married man with thinning hair was not as unseemly as it might have been in another era. And besides, the couple was truly in love. The variance in age, and even the fact that he had a wife, made no difference. Lauren came from a broken home and believed marriage was a legal thing that rarely made it past the five-year mark anyway. She just wanted to be with Humphrey and he wanted to be with her. The two kept dodging bullets, slipping away from the press, setting up a tryst at Peter Lorre’s ranch, trying to evade the questions of Hawks and other colleagues. Mayo, eternally suspicious of her husband’s co-stars, kept trying to find out Humphrey’s whereabouts when he was away from home. But she was getting more and more sodden with liquor, and had trouble thinking it all through. She did make one nasty call, tracking him down at Warners one afternoon. “Hello, lover boy. How’re you doing with your daughter? She’s half your age, you know.”
At the same time, she must have been aware that she was the prime cause of their deteriorating marriage. For Mayo vowed to make a prodigious effort to clean up her act, to quit drinking and change her bristling, hostile behavior. During an interview with a Life reporter she went so far as to link arms with Humphrey, projecting sobriety and brightness. “In five years,” she predicted saucily, the Bogarts were “going to retire and become beachcombers. That is, if he can keep his hair and teeth that long.” Humphrey stayed true to his code. He wanted to believe his wife and felt that he owed her this one last chance. Bacall was to remember, “He told me, ‘I had to go back. I wouldn’t throw a dog out in the street in her condition. I have to give her every chance.’ So he went back, and I cried. What else was there to do?”
In October, To Have and Have Not opened to rave reviews. Lauren’s long hair and up-from-under gaze was labeled “the Look” and ignited a fashion trend. The film itself was compared favorably to Casablanca. Humphrey assumed the status of Warners’ biggest box office draw, and the young woman who played opposite him vaulted into national celebrity. Not since Greta Garbo’s 1939 performance as a no-nonsense Bolshevik in Ninotchka had audiences seen so strong a female performer. Throughout the film Lauren had given as good as she got, standing up to Captain Morgan and even singing in her own, true husky voice, accompanied by Hoagy Carmichael. Steam seemed to form on the windows whenever she made an entrance, prompting the New York Times to comment: “Hers is mainly a job of radiating as much sex as the law will allow.” It was a heady time, with praise coming in from both coasts. The only discouraging words were uttered by playwright Moss Hart. When he met Lauren during a publicity tour in New York, he offered his congratulations—and then warned, “You realize, of course, from here on you have nowhere to go but down.” She l
aughed his words away. In the next few weeks she would have reason to recall them.
As the raves continued, the affair ebbed. Humphrey’s timing could not have been worse: he and Lauren were about to co-star in a new movie, The Big Sleep, an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler mystery. This, too, would be directed by Howard Hawks, the disapproving critic of the Bogart-Bacall romance. Acutely miserable as filming began, Lauren pretended to be nothing more than a friend to the love of her life; for his part, Humphrey kept an emotional distance. The deep freeze lasted only a month.
For, given a final opportunity to turn her life around and save her marriage, Mayo had violently backslid. She hit the bottle hard and began a new series of irrational harangues and arguments. Humphrey could stand no more: he left home, took a room in a Beverly Hills hotel, and made an official statement to the press. This was a trial separation; it had nothing to do with “another woman.” Immediately afterward, reporters went to the other half of the Battling Bogarts for her view of the separation. She said she loved Humphrey and would attempt to get back in his good graces. She would go to rehab; that would demonstrate her goodwill. So she did, and the Bogarts tried yet another reconciliation. Three days later Mayo started drinking again. She heard Humphrey on the phone with Lauren and grabbed the receiver: “Listen, you Jewish bitch—who’s going to wash his socks? Are you? Are you going to take care of him?” After that incident, Lauren’s mother told her she was throwing her life away, friends told her she was making a tragic mistake, and Howard Hawks told her she was a damn fool. “Bogart likes his life,” the director insisted. “He likes the drinking and he likes his wife—you’re throwing away a whole career because of something that’s just not going to happen.” To distract Lauren, he and Slim tried to fix her up with a widower, an actor whose wife had perished in a wartime plane crash. He came to call in a captain’s uniform, handsome, compelling, dimpled, the cynosure of a million women. Lauren found him dull and unappealing. Even now she was too far gone on Humphrey to look at another man, even if that man was Clark Gable.
Hawks resented her attitude, and disliked Humphrey’s inability to make up his mind. But he was too much of a pro to let it destroy the picture. On the contrary; when he saw sparks continue to fly between the leading man and leading lady on-screen, he diminished the roles of the other young women in The Big Sleep and built up Lauren’s part. Originally, Raymond Chandler expressed great happiness when Humphrey was chosen to play Philip Marlowe. “Bogart can be tough without a gun,” he wrote his British publisher. “Also he has a sense of humor that contains the grating undertone of contempt. [Alan] Ladd is hard, bitter and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article.” The novelist was less satisfied when Martha Vickers, who played Lauren’s nymphomaniac sister, turned out to be “so good she shattered Miss Bacall completely. So they cut the picture in such a way that all her best scenes were left out except one.” And he was unhappier still when Hawks shoehorned in some new double-entendre dialogue that was not in the book. The heiress Vivian Rutledge (Lauren) spars with Philip Marlowe, private eye, in a conversation about playing the horses when Vivian speaks of watching a stallion to see whether he likes to be a front-runner or come from behind. She figures Marlowe is the kind who gets out in front, opens up a lead, then takes it easy in the backstretch before coming home.
On the detective’s part, he believes she has a touch of class, but he isn’t certain how far she can go.
That, Vivian informs him, depends on who’s in the saddle.
Hawks and his writers were still heating up the script when Chandler saw an early print. He was not asked to view later versions. The Big Sleep no longer belonged to him and he knew it. Warners had taken over. The novelist shrugged it off; no one had a better sense of place, but plotting was not his long suit. When screenwriters Jules Furthman and William Faulkner phoned to ask who had killed one of the victims, Chandler read over his work—and couldn’t give an answer. He consoled himself with the hope that with all the confusion, “If Hawks got his way, the picture will be the best of its kind.” Hawks did get his way, and while he was about it, made Humphrey into a Philip Marlowe no other actor has ever approached—even though there have been many who tried. These included Robert Mitchum and James Garner, who more closely resembled the novelist’s description of Marlowe; Robert Montgomery and Dick Powell, who brought some comedy to the detective’s backchat, but who could not furnish him with a soul; and George Montgomery and Elliot Gould, who, in Chandler’s phrase, were as sophisticated as a French count in a high school play.
Only Humphrey gave his Marlowe the essential tone of film noir. He seemed born to play this part, with a face as stark and angular as the cinematography. His lean physique suggested self-denial, as if any indulgences—other than booze, of course—were not to be admitted. His voice was terse but oddly musical, so that in one scene he could convey amusement and a rude wit, and in another he could be romantic and sexually suggestive, and in yet another he could be so unyielding and masculine that even big-league gangsters gave him a wide berth. Perhaps the best example of Marlowe’s dangerous quality came when women were out of the picture. Marlowe and Eddie Mars, a smooth, callous mob figure, face off when the sleuth wants to know how come Mars has the key to a house.
MARS: Is it any of your business?
MARLOWE: I could make it my business.
MARS: I could make your business mine.
MARLOWE: Oh, you wouldn’t like it. The pay’s too small.
The end of the filming coincided with the conclusion of the Bogart marriage. This time there was no going back. Humphrey tried to handle Mayo with kindness and assurance, impressing on her the fact that their marriage simply didn’t work anymore, that it was his fault as well as hers, that he wasn’t angry with her, and that he would make a generous financial settlement. He left the house, moved to the Garden of Allah, but continued to call her, offering advice and consolation. To his astonishment, Mayo agreed to go to Reno for a quickie divorce. She had battled all the phantom competition like a tigress, observed Humphrey’s friend Nathaniel Benchley. “Now that the real thing had arrived it was almost as though she sensed the futility of trying to fight any longer.” A few rough moments remained; then it was over. The divorce took place on May 10, 1945.
The world war and the domestic one were winding down at the same time and optimism was abroad in the land. The novelist Louis Bromfield had struck up a friendship with Humphrey during one of his frequent visits to Hollywood, and when the romance with Bacall went public he offered the couple refuge two thousand miles from California. Twelve days after his divorce from Mayo became final, Humphrey and Lauren boarded the Super Chief in Pasadena and journeyed to Lucas, Ohio. From there they were conveyed to Bromfield’s Malabar Farm, where a judge quietly married them in the great hallway of the main house. The Los Angeles Times reported that “Miss Bacall was dressed in a light pink, two-piece dress with brown accessories and wore a bracelet on each arm. Bogart, clad in a gray suit, maroon tie, and sporting a white carnation in his lapel, appeared more at ease than the bride.” Perhaps, but Bacall remembered that her new husband gave the lie to his tough-guy image by crying throughout the ceremony.
Several days later the Bogarts returned to California. They settled into a furnished house in Beverly Hills, along with a cook and handyman-gardener. In time, a butler was added. Humphrey had grown up with servants, but having a retinue was heady stuff for Lauren; until the marriage, the only live-in help she knew were her mother and grandmother. Even the news that Warners was going to hold up the release of The Big Sleep couldn’t bother her now. Besides, the studio had its own good reasons: its backlog of war movies had to go first, before the country wearied of battle scenes and grim heroics. So, after a few days’ rest, Mr. and Mrs. Bogart philosophically went forth to work on their respective films. Humphrey would star in Dead Reckoning with the blond Bad Girl Lizabeth Scott; Lauren was the female lead in Confide
ntial Agent opposite the romantic Frenchman Charles Boyer—born, incidentally, the same year as her husband. All seemed well. But the new Mrs. B. was a congenital worrier. Would there be room for a star like Humphrey when all the young, good-looking actors returned from service and wanted back into films? Would his “experienced face” be desirable in the postwar period? Or would her husband become a back number like George Raft and so many other onetime stars? And what of her own career? How would Lauren Bacall do when she wasn’t acting with Humphrey Bogart? At such times, the flippant words of Moss Hart came back to haunt her. In the months ahead she was to note ruefully, “He turned out to be a prophet.”
CHAPTER 5
May You Never Die Till I Kill You
i
When the war ended, Humphrey sold Sluggy and acquired a new boat: a fifty-four-foot yawl called Santana, the name of the yacht in Key Largo. He also bought a luxurious new home at 2707 Benedict Canyon Road in Beverly Hills. (Both were previously owned by onetime stars, the vessel by Dick Powell, the house by Hedy Lamarr.) These purchases were eminently affordable, as was the Bogarts’ domestic staff, as were new furnishings and a long, top-of-the-line mink coat for Betty, aka “Baby” (Humphrey refused to address his wife by her professional name, and she addressed him as “Bogie”). A new Warner Bros. contract guaranteed the studio’s prize possession, Humphrey DeForest Bogart, one studio project per year at a fee of $200,000, plus director and script approval, plus permission to do one film per year for another studio. These terms were valid for the next fifteen years, come what may. The portents were all good: in 1946 alone he earned $467,000, making him the highest-paid actor in the world. He felt relaxed enough to look back on his career with the tone of an elder statesman: “I believe if I had not been given the movie role of Duke Mantee, in The Petrified Forest, I’d now be out of films altogether. Duke was my first heavy role, and I like heavies, having no desire to be sympathetic or romantic. Roles like those Van Johnson gets would give me the screaming meemies.” Besides, he added, most of the time Mantee had to be menacing while sitting down. “I had had so many violently active stage parts that the chair felt fine. Putting across a characterization without benefit of the usual movement and gestures that help hold an audience’s attention is a special kind of problem.”
Tough Without a Gun Page 14
