Reentering the States, Spiegel worked his way to Los Angeles, where he devised his own way to Hollywood prominence: hosting A-list parties. He borrowed funds, crashed other people’s fetes, and worked the rooms, making contacts and eventually staging his own bashes. These made Spiegel notorious but difficult to resist; the food and drink were incomparable, and he allowed—in fact encouraged—gambling and unrestricted sex on his rented premises (Marilyn Monroe was said to be one of his “house girls”). Ultimately he convinced investors to back two pictures, one made by Orson Welles. In later years Welles disavowed The Stranger because his artistic flourishes were sharply edited by Spiegel, turning an experimental film into a conventional thriller. Nevertheless the movie made a profit and convinced major studios that Welles was a bankable talent.
From the start Spiegel had been unhappy with the script of The Stranger; he had hired John Huston to help with the rewrites. A friendship developed between the two aggressive seducers. In 1949 they founded a production company, Horizon Pictures. Their first film, We Were Strangers, directed by Huston and produced by one S. P. Eagle, miscast John Garfield and Jennifer Jones as Cuban revolutionaries. “It wasn’t a very good choice,” Huston was to concede, “and it wasn’t a very good picture.” The partners had learned their lesson, however. Next time out they would be more careful in their choice of material and performers. Huston learned that Forester’s Congo romance had a history of options that had gone nowhere. Columbia wanted to adapt African Queen for their husband-and-wife team of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. Nothing came of it. Warners acquired the property with David Niven and Bette Davis in mind. Nothing came of that, either.
No studio had ever really believed in the project. For at its center was a love story set in 1915 between two rapidly aging cranks. Charlie Allnut is a gin-soaked Cockney skipper plying the Ruki River; Rose Sayer is an uptight British spinster who aids her brother, the Rev. Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley), in his vocation: converting the local animists to Christianity.
Charlie is the siblings’ only link with the outside world, irregularly bringing them packets of mail from their native England. This time he brings cataclysmic news along with the letters. German armies have invaded East Africa; the kaiser’s troops are only hours away. The Sayers refuse to move. Charlie shrugs and goes upriver, whereupon enemy soldiers invade the Sayers’ turf as predicted, burning down huts and forcibly conscripting the villagers. The reverend protests and gets savagely beaten by a German officer. Wounded and in shock, he succumbs to jungle fever. Not long afterward, Charlie returns. He helps the grieving Rose bury her brother, and invites her to come aboard his little craft. The reprobate will take her downriver to a safe haven, then move on to his own hiding place where he can wait out the war in drunken tranquillity.
But Rose is made of stronger stuff. She wants her brother’s death avenged, and conceives a plan to make the Germans suffer. The river is a tributary to Lake Albert, where a German ship, the Louisa, is known to be anchored. She and Charlie can make their way to the lake, convert the African Queen into a torpedo boat, and head it toward the Louisa, diving off just before it hits. Charlie regards her plan as insane: “There’s death a hundred times over,” he warns. Hazards include an enemy fort facing the river, as well as three sets of dangerous rapids.
A war of nerves begins, with Charlie grousing about Rose’s lofty, teetotaling attitude (“Nature,” Mr. Allnut, “is what we’re put on earth to rise above”) and Rose getting revenge for Charlie’s drunkenness by spilling every last drop of his precious Gordon’s gin into the black water. Nonetheless, with each hazardous nautical mile they draw closer and closer. Despite themselves, the virgin and the reprobate fall in love. In the novel their mission fails, the Germans capture the couple, decide that it would be uncivilized to order their execution, and, flying a flag of truce, hand them over to the English. Forester’s ending was the weakest part of the novel. Rose and Charlie plan to get married by the local British consul. Having created an unusual romance, the author denigrated it in the final line: “Whether or not they lived happily ever after would be difficult to say.”
A reader at RKO found the principals of the story “physically unattractive” and the tale itself “distasteful and not a little disgusting.” At a previous time that judgment would not have been made. But as the postwar era came to an end, youth received a new emphasis—in fashion, in business, in ads, and, inevitably, in films, old was out. Men and women were marrying younger, starting families earlier, establishing themselves in their twenties and thirties. It was assumed that when they went out to the movies, they wanted to see reflections of themselves and their generation. The idea of love between two expatriates who appeared to be in late middle age was clearly unacceptable. It would be like watching their grandparents canoodling. “A story of two old people going up and down an African river?” scoffed producer Alexander Korda. “Who’s going to be interested in that? You’ll be bankrupt.”
Something else weighed down the material as well, though it went undiscussed. Miss Sayer is a deeply pious Methodist, bent on saving souls. For her the New Testament is not a series of homilies and metaphors, but the revealed and literal truth. America in midcentury was on the cusp of a secular age, and religious movies like The Miracle of the Bells and Going My Way were no longer big at the box office. Yet there remained millions of Christians who wouldn’t stand for ridicule or irreverence on-screen. Thus The African Queen would be forced to please both camps, the believers and the fallen away, a tightrope walk if ever there was one.
In 1950 Huston, almost alone, saw great possibilities in a screen adaptation. (Spiegel was the other true believer. He went on record in the The New Yorker, burbling to Lillian Ross that The African Queen would “give John the kind of commercial hit he had when he made The Maltese Falcon in 1941.”) There were a few provisos. Horizon would have to wrest the property from Warner Bros. at a bargain price. Huston would have to shoot on location—none of those bogus rear-screen projections of hippos and natives Hollywood was so fond of. He would have to devise a more appropriate and cinematic ending. And most important, the partners would have to have major stars for this production. The first obstacle seemed insurmountable. Warners named what they considered a reasonable sum. But in the early 1950s, when the average yearly income was about three thousand dollars and the Dow Jones average seldom rose above eleven hundred, fifty thousand dollars was more than Huston and Spiegel could pay. Rising to the occasion, Sam worked out a deal with Sound Services, Inc., a company that rented sound equipment to filmmakers. The partners guaranteed to pay back the loan with interest in a year’s time. As a sweetener Horizon also promised to use Sound Service equipment to make African Queen, with a big listing in the screen credits.
As soon as he acquired the rights, Sam went after financing for the movie. Though its cast was small, its locations were hazardous and far away. An arrangement was made with James and John Woolf, the brothers who ran the British production company Romulus Films. In her lively biography of Spiegel, Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni points out that Romulus had failed with its previous production, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, starring James Mason and Ava Gardner. “British films were doing no good,” recalled John Woolf, “and the idea of making films with Hollywood actors greatly appealed.” Once the money was in place, Huston snagged Humphrey. “Before I met John,” Humphrey told a reporter, “my range was Beverly Hills to Palm Springs. Now the Monster wants me to fly twelve thousand miles into the Congo. And the crazy thing is that I’ve agreed to go.”
Spiegel took it upon himself to deliver the female lead. He sent Katharine Hepburn a copy of The African Queen. Several days later it was she who called him.
Her voice thrummed. “It’s fascinating. Who’s going to play what’s his—yes—Charlie Allnut.”
She was informed that it was to be Humphrey Bogart. Her reaction: immediate delight. He’s “the only man who could have played that part.” Her co-star was equally pleased. Recalled H
uston: Bogie’s “idea of doing it with Katie Hepburn—instantly appealing.”
C. S. Forester, né Cecil Louis Troughton Smith, had gained international recognition with the seagoing tales of Captain Horatio Horn-blower. These led to a Hollywood contract, and until the beginning of World War II the author spent thirteen weeks of every year working as a screenwriter. He had his own plans for The African Queen.
But Forester’s health broke down in the late 1940s. Having created the story, he was forced to make way for younger and healthier writers to bring it to the screen. An early version was prepared by the British short story writer John Collier (Fancies and Goodnights). Huston now brought in James Agee. The forty-two-year-old critic and author had singled out Maltese Falcon and Sierra Madre for special praise in Time and the Nation, but had never attempted a screenplay. Even so, Huston looked upon Agee with favor—especially after a series of interviews, followed by the publication of “Undirectable Director” in Life magazine. Huston’s movies, observed the writer, “continually open the eye and require it to work vigorously, and through the eye they awaken curiosity and intelligence. That, by any virile standard, is essential to good entertainment. It is unquestionably essential to good art.”
Agee fancied himself a rebel, and Huston actually was one, so they got along famously from the beginning. Both men were drinkers and smokers; both liked intense conversations deep into the night and serious tennis in the afternoon. It was the last predilection that kept the screenwriter from completing his project: he suffered a severe heart attack after playing a set with his new boss, and was sidelined for the production. Peter Viertel, a well-traveled scenarist who had written the script for We Were Strangers, took his place. Agee’s effort, Viertel recalled, “was laden with brilliant descriptions, but there were practically no dialogue scenes.” He flew off to the Congo to get a feel for the place.
Meantime, Humphrey and Lauren made ready for the voyage. Not since World War II had Humphrey been overseas. These days his idea of an out-of-town trip was taking Santana beyond the three-mile limit. To get him to go to the Congo and Uganda required more than Huston’s considerable powers of persuasion. It also required financing. After much negotiating, Horizon agreed to pay Bogart a deferred payment of $125,000, and of greater significance, 30 percent of the gross. (Hepburn would receive $65,000 in cash, plus 10 percent of the gross.) Humphrey gave in on any number of points, but he remained inflexible about one: Lauren would have to accompany him every mile of the way. His first and second marriages had suffered because he and his wives pursued separate careers. Not this time. Lauren was happy to accede to her husband’s wishes, and Huston, scamp though he was, knew better than to come between the Bogarts.
Taking a two-year-old to the oppressive conditions in Africa would have been unthinkable. So young Stephen was left behind in the care of a nursemaid, Alice Hartley. She took the boy to the airport to wave good-bye to his parents. Shortly after the plane ascended Hartley gripped the child, moaned, and slumped to the ground. She had suffered a massive stroke and died that night. From New York, Lauren arranged for her mother to assume the caretaker role. The Bogarts had made their commitment to the film; now they wondered whether they were sailing under a curse. Concerned and fearful they pressed on, boarding the Liberté and heading for Britain.
Although Hepburn and Bogart were both major stars, they had only met en passant in Hollywood. In London they got the chance to speak at length. As it turned out, they had much in common. Both had been hellions from childhood onward. Their mothers were militant feminists. Their fathers were medical men—Humphrey’s a surgeon, Katharine’s a urologist. Both stars were known for their intense romantic involvements; although four of Humphrey’s led to the altar, Katharine had only been a wife once. She was now intimately involved with the married Spencer Tracy. The pair had already co-starred in half a dozen movies.
Following a script conference—the film still had no ending—the actors left for Italy. Neither of them had been to Vatican City before, and it was very much a when-in-Rome proposition. Humphrey, born Episcopalian, and Lauren, born Jewish, met a starstruck priest in the city. Monsignor John Patrick Carroll-Abbing promised to arrange an audience with Pope Pius XII, and the Bogarts did nothing to discourage him. The next day they received an invitation to Vatican City, where His Holiness scrutinized the actress and remarked fluently, “You are Miss Lauren Bacall!” As he went on, the pope-struck Humphrey remembered, “I was so overwhelmed that I don’t know now whether someone said I was Miss Bacall’s husband.” He suddenly became aware that Pius XII had turned to address him. “He asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ And you know what I heard myself saying? ‘San Francisco.’ I don’t know if my subconscious thought the word ‘Hollywood’ too tawdry or what. I simply said ‘San Francisco,’ and then was too stunned to say another word.”
While the Bogarts toured the churches and museums, Katharine went on a clandestine tour with Spencer, who had flown in unannounced. “We drove all over the place,” she recalled, but the press “never got a picture of us together.” He flew out, also unannounced. When it came time for Katharine to depart, she outwitted the paparazzi at the airport, arriving early and hiding in a ladies’ room until they went away. It was left to the Bogarts to smile and pose for photographers.
All three expected to be greeted by Huston when they arrived at Stanleyville, in the Belgian Congo. They were met instead by screenwriter Peter Viertel. Their director had gone on a hunting expedition. Or so it was implied. Katharine thought otherwise. In her memoir she theorizes that Huston “was absolutely horrified at the thought of beginning the picture, and the sight of us was the knell of doom. It was an utterly piggish thing to do and it makes me mad to think of it even now—goddamn—goddamn.…”
Much worse lay in store. Scorpions and spiders took up residence in the sinks; mosquitoes and tsetse flies swarmed in the humid ninety-degree air; poisonous snakes and crocodiles threatened the paths and riverbanks. When Huston finally did show up he was delighted at the plethora of creatures and the lack of creature comforts. In his view, Treasure of the Sierra Madre gave audiences a sense of the heat and hazards of Mexico because it was shot on location, and by God, if he had anything to do with it African Queen would convey the overpowering might and menace of the Congolese jungle.
Once the director, writer, cast, and technicians got to the set, a series of routines began. First, the ladies took stock of each other’s looks and abilities. Lauren was wary at the start, noting that Katharine “talked compulsively,” quite often about herself. But the younger actress acknowledged that it “really took guts to travel so far without a friend or companion.” For her part, Katharine admired Lauren’s “fund of pugilistic good-nature.” Years before, a drunken Mayo Methot had mocked Lauren’s inability to wash Humphrey’s socks. Yet in Africa that’s exactly what Lauren did, in addition to laundering her husband’s shirts and underwear and pressing his garments. Katharine could only gaze in wonder.
She was not so indulgent when she got around to her director. The important people had their own huts, but had to use outdoor privies. Huston’s dwelling place was the grandest, because it had a private shower. “I never did see him go to the outhouse,” Katharine maliciously remarked. “Maybe he never did. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Would explain a great deal.”
She was also wry about an incongruous, potbellied figure who periodically popped in, wearing outfits better suited to Palm Beach. This was the impresario Sam Spiegel (S. P. Eagle). “I watched him in his shorts and colored shirts rushing around that camp in the rain,” Katharine wrote, “and I thought: The man who has to pay the bills—terrifying.” Yet she quite liked him because she believed, as William Blake did, that energy is eternal delight: “He loves his work and he loves his life. He’s a doer.”
And gradually, almost in spite of herself, she came around to admiring Huston. There was no romantic involvement—Katharine only had eyes for Spencer—but she watched John having the time of hi
s life, sightseeing from the air, hunting big game, while around him all were sweating. She decided to get in on the act. Spiegel learned of her plans and became splenetic: “Katie—setting off with John in a little plane—how can you—how? You may be killed. Then what …”
When she refused to alter her plans, Spiegel appealed to Humphrey. He confronted Katharine. These were wild animals that deserved to live out their lives undisturbed by interlopers. “Katie, what’s happened to you? You’re a decent human being.”
“Not anymore I’m not. If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun. John has fun.”
“John. That son of a bitch has gotten to you.”
“He’s seeing Africa.”
“You’re making a picture.”
“Yes, I’m making a picture, but I’m seeing life at the same time.”
Humphrey gave up. “She’s gone,” he told Spiegel. “Under the spell.”
He kept referring to Huston as the Monster, but with diminishing conviction. For if he disliked the director’s manipulation of Katharine as if she were a Bryn Mawr junior, he admired the way he helped her create the leading lady of The African Queen. Early on in the filming, Katharine had trouble getting a hook on Rose Sayer’s character. Was she just a dry stick in a long skirt, a fundamentalist prude who took joy in correcting others? In that case, how could an audience find her sympathetic? The rehearsals were unsatisfactory; they discomfited John, Humphrey, and Katharine herself. And then, from out of nowhere, the director made a suggestion. What if Rose Sayer’s tone and diction were to suggest Eleanor Roosevelt’s? FDR’s lovably naïve, somewhat censorious widow was famous for her all-purpose expression and lofty diction. Servants, heads of state, journalists, northern liberals, and hostile Republicans received the identical toothy “society smile,” and a grand statement delivered in her unique, unsteady soprano. Katharine thought about John’s idea, brightened, and concluded, “That is the goddamnedest best piece of direction I have ever heard.” From that point on she impersonated the former first lady and, at the same time, slyly commented on Eleanor’s refusal to recognize adversity. It was the turning point of her midlife career.
Tough Without a Gun Page 20
