Humphrey had an easier time getting into the cranky persona of Charlie Allnut. He was incapable of doing a Cockney accent, so the Londoner became an all-purpose Canadian and Charlie’s age was adjusted upward. His “uniform”—canvas shoes, hat and trousers that once were white, horizontally striped shirt—was set off with a bright red neckerchief. This gave him an eccentric, jaunty style. But he fought against any hint of movie star glamour. With films like The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, cinematographer Jack Cardiff had built a strong reputation for making actors look more attractive than they actually were. Humphrey was having none of it. He warned Cardiff that the famous Bogart “lines and wrinkles” had been cultivated for years. “They are me,” he continued, “so don’t try to light them out and make me look like a goddam fag.” If nothing else, Charlie Allnut was all male, like the Fred C. Dobbs of Sierra Madre and the Dixon Steele of In a Lonely Place. The difference was that those men began with some appeal, then descended into paranoia and self-destruction. Charlie would reverse the process, starting off as Miss Sayer’s irritable antagonist and winding up as a lover who would prove alluring not only to Rose but to the audience. “I slowly got him into it,” Huston said, “showing him by expression and gesture what I thought Allnut should be like. He first imitated me, then all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man. He realized he was on to something new and good. He said to me, ‘John, don’t let me lose it.’ ” In making that appeal, Humphrey was sharply aware of Ernest Hemingway’s observation about writing. He felt it applied doubly to acting: “When you’ve got it you’ve got to keep going because when you’ve lost it you’ve lost it and God knows when you’ll get it back.” John made certain that Humphrey stayed on key; the surrounding conditions did the rest.
The director had logged twenty-five thousand miles of air time in an attempt to find just the right landscape. One place he selected was an isolated bank of the Ruiki River, an inky, slow-moving tributary to the Lualaba choked with decaying vegetation. Other parts of The African Queen were shot in and around Uganda, Murchison Falls on the border of Lake Albert, and the Belgian Congo, identified in the film as German East Africa, its name during World War I. (Subsequently the country was known as Zaire, before the name was changed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) “I wanted those characters to sweat when the script called for it,” Huston was to recall. “On a sound stage you fake it, but in Africa you don’t have to imagine that it’s hot, that it’s so humid and wet that cigarettes turn green with mold; it really is hot and clothes do mildew overnight—and when people sweat it isn’t with the help of a makeup man.”
The gradations of local color came at a steep price. Katharine described some daily catastrophes: “John would scream—Bogie and I would jump—and the boiler would be tipped over, or nearly. The canopy would be torn off. The camera or lamps or whatever was caught by the overhanging shrubbery on the banks.… The hysteria of each shot was a nightmare.” The director, who played up his bwana role to the Africans, zealously guarded the boat during the daytime, but relied on laborers to look after it at night. They listened carefully to his instructions: nothing must be taken from the vessel, no one must be allowed on until he gave the say-so. One evening they observed with particular interest as the African Queen sprang an internal leak. Huston’s orders were obeyed to the letter. Noted Lauren: “The Natives had been told to watch it and they did—they watched it sink.” It took three days to haul the boat to the surface of the Ruiki, and a few more to make it buoyant again.
Most of the crew became ill during the shooting. Katharine joined the walking wounded; because of severe digestive problems she lost some twenty pounds, a great deal of weight for someone constitutionally thin. At times she was forced to throw up between takes, but she never took a sick day. Dysentery was common, as were malaria and a general malaise. The only ones who escaped the misery were Humphrey and John, who made a point of staying away from bottled water, eating only canned food, and drinking nothing but beer and straight whiskey from a makeshift bar set up under the trees. Katharine learned too late that those water bottles were contaminated. She remembered bitterly, “I—the queen of water drinking—the urologist’s prize—was the sickest. And those two undisciplined weaklings had so lined their insides with alcohol that no bug could live in the atmosphere.”
All along, the undisciplined weaklings teased Katharine, writing obscenities on the mirror in her hut and cavorting loudly even when they were cold sober. John claimed that anything that bit him soon dropped dead of alcohol poisoning. “Nothing bites me,” Humphrey liked to boast. “A solid wall of whiskey keeps the insects at bay.” Yet she found both men irresistible. “Katie has a weakness for wastrels,” the director observed, twinkling. After all, look at Spencer Tracy …
In theory, The African Queen was an epic drama writ small, a story of human endurance against the formidable odds of weather, topography, and war. In practice, it was all that and more; it was a human comedy, a bright look at the battle of the sexes. The film wasn’t planned that way, but the Bogart-Hepburn chemistry surprised everyone—most of all themselves—by becoming humorous rather than erotic. Humphrey had a natural gift for leavening his hard-nosed characters with a sardonic expression, and Katharine had played opposite some of American cinema’s great light comedians, including Cary Grant, James Stewart, and, of course, Spencer Tracy. Humphrey proved to be their equal. When Hepburn came to appraise him she wrote, “Bogie was funny. A generous actor. Always knew his lines. Always was on time. Hated anything false. He was an extraordinarily decent fellow. Fair—forthright—uncomplicated. Fun too—a good sense of humor. Devilish if he thought you were a phony. Like a cat with a mouse, he’d never let you off.” She was particularly taken with his performance after the African Queen’s odd couple enjoy one discreet night of love. Rose asks, “Dear … dear, what is your first name?” After he informs her, Charlie walks away. “I’ll never forget that closeup of him after he kisses Rosie,” she wrote, “then goes around the back of the gas tank and considers what has happened. His expression—the wonder of it all—life.”
The only time Humphrey locked horns with John was during the film’s “leech scene,” when Allnut clambers aboard the African Queen after immersing himself in a particularly bad stretch of water. At this point John brought a leech breeder to the set—after all, what was the point of being on location, sweating real sweat, suffering real fever, if you weren’t going to use real bloodsuckers? Humphrey adamantly refused to permit a single leech on his body. The director fumed, threatened, wheedled, charmed. No sale. “So the rest of that day,” Katharine recalled, “was spent trying to find—invent—a material that would stick to Bogie’s skinny frame.” Tight closeups were taken of the breeder’s flesh loaded with parasites. When Humphrey was shown in a full body shot, he struggled with rubber leeches. This was one of the few inauthentic sequences in the film. Others included a few rear-screen projections and some model shots of the boat bobbing in rough water. But these were minor in a poignant comedy whose final touches were completed in London and Hollywood. Huston was immensely pleased with the result, especially since he and Viertel had concocted the finale at the last minute, much as the writers of Casablanca had done in 1944. Alternate conclusions had the couple rescued by a British warship; a proposal of marriage by Rose, before the British consul; and the vanishing of Charlie, when he suddenly recalls the wife he had abandoned in England twenty years before. None of them would do; the picture demanded a happy ending, and an ingenious, if implausible, deus ex machina supplied it.
Now that the ordeal was over, everyone was free to let off steam. Huston was vastly amused with some Bogart interviews. In one, Humphrey looked over the new crop of slovenly dressed Method actors, men who tended to make up their lines as they went along. The established star picked on the newbie. “I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum,” Humphrey recalled. “Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with on
ly a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed.” Yet when he spoke of the way he and Katharine had worked, it seemed right in line with Brando’s belief that actors uttering memorized speeches were about as convincing as a child reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” You had to get the gist of the scene and make up the rest. “We seldom learned our lines for The African Queen,” Humphrey stated in a different interview. “Instead we just got the general idea and talked each scene out overlapping one another, cutting one another off, as people do in everyday conversation.” That technique, Huston observed, was right out of the hated Actors Studio manual. It would have been unlikely for Humphrey to acknowledge his debt to the Method actors, leading men who refused to learn their parts by rote. But despite his grumbles and put-downs, Humphrey’s technique had evolved over the years, and he had shrewdly kept pace with the latest performing styles.
While the film was wrapping two pieces of information came in, one heartening, the other heartbreaking. John Huston had become the father of a little girl, Anjelica, by his fourth wife, ballerina Ricki Soma. And Humphrey Bogart learned that the body of his third wife, Mayo Methot, had been found at a motel in Multnomah, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. The forty-seven-year-old actress had completely dropped out of sight, vainly struggling with alcoholism, depression, and more recently the results of a cancer operation. The corpse went undiscovered for several days. Humphrey shook his head when he heard the news. There was no schadenfreude here. “Too bad. Such a waste,” he lamented. “Mayo had real talent. She had just thrown her life away.”
Once the Bogarts returned to their house, Humphrey’s spirits picked up. He had paid his dues, roughed it in deepest Africa, made a film, and returned in one piece. He was back where he belonged, in his house, with Lauren and Stephen at his side and his boat bobbing at the yacht club. In February The African Queen opened in New York to qualify for the Academy Awards. By then it had received raves from most of the British papers. “You’ve probably seen the English reviews, which are, without exception, positively lyrical,” Huston wrote Hepburn from his estate in Ireland. “It’s as though one critic was trying to outdo the other in his praise.” The New York Times was hardly lyrical, but after Bosley Crowther labeled the movie as a “slick job of movie hoodwinking,” he went on to praise the leads: “Not since Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton appeared in The Beachcomber have the incongruities of social station and manners been so pointedly and humorously portrayed.” The rest of the papers fell in line. The reviewers had been seduced by two old pros with decades of experience behind them. Humphrey and Katharine were at once durable and vulnerable, and knew how to use their thinness to great advantage. Rose Sayer was appraised as gaunt, proud, and lovely; Humphrey was considered skinny, coarse, and irresistible. As a pair they were like tennis pros who engaged in long rallies, not because they were trying to win the volley but because they wanted the sheer exhilaration of playing the game. And play it they did, to the full extent of their considerable gifts.
United Artists knew what it had. A quiet campaign got under way to get the star his first Academy Award; he had been nominated for Casablanca twelve years earlier. This was done with Humphrey’s assent, an abrupt about-face from his stance delivered only a year before. In Cosmopolitan Humphrey had written an article declaring, “It’s about time someone stuck a pin in the Oscar Myth and let out all that hot air contained in the Academy Awards.” As he saw it, the only way performances could be weighed against one another was to have all actors play the same part—Hamlet, say—and for all actresses to play, for example, Mildred Pierce. But as 1953 began, Humphrey revised his thinking. He had made a sensational breakthrough with his first Technicolor film. How many other chances would he have at a trifecta: fine script, perfect co-star, ideal director? It was now or never for that little statuette.
And so provocative items began to appear in columns and features, quoting Humphrey or Katharine or both, and so Humphrey appeared as a guest on various radio shows, and so the academy nominated him in the Best Actor category, along with Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress. In his dark moments Humphrey considered the nomination to be a consolation prize. The hottest film under consideration was A Streetcar Named Desire, starring the new, new thing, Marlon Brando. Still, this was only Brando’s second film; there was an outside chance for a sentimental favorite. The auguries were good; Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, who had a total of eight nominations between them, believed he would win. What’s more, Lauren was pregnant. Prior to the ceremonies Humphrey did a lot of grousing; when people win they should be grateful to no one but themselves. They did the acting, why recite a laundry list of thank-yous? He maintained that attitude until the night of March 20, 1952, at the RKO Pantages Theater in Hollywood.
Streetcar was the big winner; Vivien Leigh had already won Best Actress, and Karl Malden had been named Best Supporting Actor. Greer Garson came onstage to repeat the names of the nominees for Best Actor: Marlon Brando for Streetcar, Humphrey Bogart for African Queen, Fredric March for Death of a Salesman, Montgomery Clift for A Place in the Sun, Arthur Kennedy for Bright Victory. Lauren squeezed her husband’s hand as the winner was announced: Humphrey Bogart. “A scream went up from the audience,” Lauren remembered. “I leapt into the air—I thought I’d have the baby then and there.” Humphrey kissed her, went up onstage, and proceeded to go against everything he had grumbled about to friends and in print, acknowledging the help and generosity of John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, and Sam Spiegel. “No one does it alone,” he told the noisy, appreciative audience. “As in tennis, you need a good opponent or partner to bring out the best in you. John and Katie helped me to be where I am now.”
A few weeks later, he assumed the old self-deprecating stance. “The best way to survive an Oscar is never to try to win another one,” he told reporters. “You’ve seen what happens to some Oscar winners. They spend the rest of their lives turning down scripts while searching for the great role to win another one. Hell, I hope I’m never even nominated again. It’s meat-and-potato roles for me from now on.”
And a few weeks after that he made the news again, when his daughter was born. Humphrey supplied the infant’s name: Leslie Howard Bogart, in honor of the man who had set him on the road to the Oscar. It could take years, but in the end Humphrey always managed to pay his debts.
CHAPTER 7
There’s Nothing You Can Do About It. Nothing!
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Humphrey had been burned by past politics, and he had no wish to engage in any more public debates about issues or candidates. When the 1952 presidential campaign got under way, he quietly backed the Republican candidate, Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower. Lauren was for Ike’s opponent, Adlai Stevenson. The status quo didn’t last very long. Lauren talked her husband into endorsing her candidate, and by early autumn the two were vigorously campaigning at “Madly for Adlai” rallies. In almost every case they proved to be a bigger draw than the Democratic candidate. Humphrey was more amused than impressed by the bright, well-spoken divorcé; not so Lauren. Adlai, she wrote, “did like to flirt, and he did like to be admired, and he did know that I was very young and had a wild crush on him.” Her adoration and effort went for naught; when the final tallies were in, Stevenson had suffered a stunning defeat—89 electoral votes for him, 442 for Ike, ending twenty years of Democratic Party rule. Lauren’s wild crush didn’t please Humphrey, nor did the fact that she was depressed for weeks after the election. He could hardly wait to get back to work with a new director, Richard Brooks.
The men had first met after World War II, when Brooks was a crew-cut ex-Marine seeking to establish himself as a screenwriter. He amassed some good credits, particularly on Key Largo, the first time Richard and Humphrey worked together. By the winter of 1952 Richard had established himself as a novelist whose latest work, The Producer, was a roman à clef about the movie business. Recalled Brooks, “There is a character, an actor, in the novel who is very much Bogart.
I asked Bogie if I should use the character. ‘Is it an honest character?’ Bogie asked. ‘I think it is,’ I said.” He asked Humphrey if he wanted to read the manuscript. “If you say it’s honest, I don’t care,” he told the author. “You have clearance.” Actually, Brooks acknowledged, “it wasn’t too complimentary a character. But Bogie went around after the novel appeared saying to people, ‘That’s me.’ ” At the same time, Brooks also established himself as an outstanding director, whose credits included Crisis and The Light Touch. The newspaper melodrama Deadline U.S.A. marked the first time he would hold the reins of a Bogart feature.
Save for the Stevenson business, everything had been going Humphrey’s way since the Academy Award: the birth of Leslie, increasing star power, enough money to buy a grandiose fourteen-room house at 232 South Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, an exclusive neighborhood near Bel Air. According to Verita Thompson, Humphrey’s hairdresser—and self-described inamorata—he was uncomfortable about moving into such a residence. (“What the hell good’s a table you can’t even set a goddamn drink on? I could put a down payment on an entire foreign country for the dough this joint set me back [$165,000], and I can’t even set my drink down without having to go find one of those little fucking coasters!”)
In fact, he relished the place, particularly a large alcove with a bar and a fireplace where the walls were covered with photos of friends. A racing trophy won by the Santana rested on the mantelpiece. All his friends were welcomed there; Brooks was a regular, and it was assumed that when Deadline went before the cameras, making the picture would be something of a lark. According to Warren Stevens, who played a reporter, Brooks made that impossible.
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