In Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, Jeffrey Meyers mentions an interview in which the actor recounted some difficult days on the set. “Brooks suddenly exploded on the first take. He had changed his mind about how to do the scene and took all day to get exactly the shot he wanted. Brooks was rude, unreasonable and hard on the crew, who once retaliated by dropping a dangerously heavy sandbag right next to where he was standing.” At the same time, Stevens said, Humphrey was quiet and deferential, pleased with his role and delighted with his co-star, Kim Hunter, who had won her own Supporting Actress Oscar at the 1952 ceremonies for her work in A Streetcar Named Desire. After one scene he congratulated her—and himself: “By God, we winged it!,” an echo of the way he and Katharine Hepburn had meshed.
Brooks had an entirely different take. Throughout the winter, Humphrey “was withdrawing,” he maintained. “There was an impatience which was totally unlike him.” On one occasion Humphrey was obviously hungover. He came to the set unprepared—a lapse unseen since his Broadway days—continually blew lines, and then blamed the script: “The thing doesn’t seem to work.” Brooks suggested that Humphrey had health issues that winter, even if there were no overt symptoms of any disease. In their biography, Bogart, A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax bring in script supervisor Kay Thackerey to speak about the star’s edginess. When he continued to have trouble with his lines, she cued him, emphasizing certain words. He snapped, “Are you trying to tell me how to read a line?” After that, she said, “Anytime I threw him a line I threw it in an absolute monotone without any inflection whatever.”
For all these conflict’s and recriminations, Humphrey’s sixty-fifth picture turned out to be quite presentable—though perhaps not what one would have expected after The African Queen. Filmmakers have usually been partial to the subject of journalism, not least because so many of them started out on newspapers, among them Herman Mankiewicz, whose experience on the New York World enlivened the story of a press lord, Citizen Kane; Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, whose Front Page reflected their experiences on Chicago papers; and Richard Brooks, former sports reporter for the New York World-Telegram, whose love of journalism gave Deadline U.S.A. a palpable vigor and authenticity. (He was wise enough to shoot the interiors at the actual offices of the New York Daily News.)
The plot revolved around the future of a large metropolitan paper and its embattled editor in chief, Ed Hutcheson (Bogart). Three crises arrive at the same moment. The owner of the Day (Ethel Barrymore) is being pressured by her spoiled, avaricious children to sell the paper to its tabloid competitor, effectively putting it out of business. In the seventy-two hours before turnover is to take place, Hutcheson aims to change her mind, expose the dangerous head of a crime syndicate (Martin Gabel), and win back his ex (Kim Hunter). The countdown begins. At the end of three days, Hutcheson has a pair of personal victories and one major defeat: the old-time “tear up page one” newspaper business has had its Day. Along the way, he articulates the highs and lows of journalism: “It’s not enough any more to give ’em just news. They want comics, contests, puzzles. They want to know how to bake a cake, win friends, and influence the future. Ergo, horoscopes, tips on the horses, interpretation of dreams so they can win on the numbers lottery. And, if they accidentally stumble on the first page—news!” Yet at a less cynical moment he tells a younger colleague: “About this wanting to be reporter—don’t ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.” And, at the finale, threatened by enemies, he holds up the phone to catch the sound of the latest news being printed: “That’s the press, baby. The press! And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing!”
By the early 1950s this portrait of print journalism was caught in a time warp. Its “tear up page one!” vigor notwithstanding, Deadline was less film noir than film crépuscule—twilight. Network television had already made deep inroads, the notion of a TV news “anchor” was introduced to the public, and newspaper circulation started on its long and irreversible decline. Brooks’s film posed as a valentine to print journalism; in reality it was an advance obit.
ii
In the field of journalism Claud Cockburn had earned a place at the bottom. In 1936, the Englishman worked his way south from Britain to Spain in order to cover the Spanish Civil War. In The First Casualty, his classic study of war correspondents, Philip Knightley notes that Cockburn couldn’t help but notice the low morale in the ranks of anti-Franco Republicans. To counter their despondency he provided his Communist periodical, The Weekly, with an account from the front. In it, the high-spirited Republican militiamen acted with great courage, showing the world how bravely and effectively progressives could fight. The battle was a total fiction; Cockburn had made the thing up out of whole cloth. One of his leftist colleagues protested. Whatever the feelings of the journalist, readers were surely entitled to facts. Cockburn disagreed: what entitled them to facts? “When they have asserted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government and the Fascists are beaten in Spain they will have such a right.” Concludes Knightley, “There can be no validity in Cockburn’s attitude. If readers are to have no right to facts, but only what a correspondent feels it is in his side’s best interest to reveal, then there is no use for war correspondents at all.”
Reporters came to realize that the righteous Englishman was simply a propagandist for Stalin. Notoriety and derision followed Cockburn after World War II, and he turned to writing humorous novels in which facts were superfluous. He retired to the west of Ireland in 1947. In the early 1950s John Huston bought and restored a Georgian house on the coast of Galway; the two became neighbors and pub mates. During this period John pulled up stakes in Hollywood. He had a revulsion for the House Un-American Activities Committee and for the blacklist that resulted from their headline-grabbing investigations in Hollywood. In his view the United States “had—temporarily at least—stopped being my country, and I was just as glad to stay clear of it.” In his memoirs he acknowledged that “the anti-Communist hysteria certainly played a role in my move to Ireland.”
The irony was that just as he settled into his new home, antihysteria forces were beginning to coalesce in California and New York in an effort to fight the blacklist. On his popular CBS-TV program, See It Now, Edward R. Murrow editorialized against Senator Joe McCarthy. (“The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies.”) The senator, who had attacked the State Department and the U.S. Army as bastions of leftism and accused the Democratic Party of “twenty years of treason,” was shown to be an irresponsible and dangerous fraud. Frontier magazine was soon to publish its blacklist exposé, “The Hollywood Story,” and under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, John Cogley began work on his two-volume Report on Blacklisting. John Huston’s voice would have been a welcome one in the still-small chorus of First Amendment defenders. But the “fight-or-flight” syndrome had taken over, and he chose flight. In the process this most American director lost his focus. It would be a quite a while before he got it back.
While in Galway, John picked up a copy of Cockburn’s novel Beat the Devil, written under the nom de plume of James Helvick. He immediately saw it as a “shaggy dog” movie. It had a ripe cast of international hustlers out to fleece an African nation. At stake were the rights to rich uranium deposits, and every one of the gang members was on the muscle, capable of betraying his or her associates at any moment. So there were laughs as well as adventures in the story. Cockburn was not doing particularly well. John smiled his usual smile, exuded his customary charm, and took an option for the bargain price of ten thousand dollars late in 1952. The money wasn’t his; he persuaded Humphrey, through Santana, to finance the deal.
It was not a hard sell. For all the grumbling, Humphrey esteemed the man who had guided him through his best work. If John Huston was a monster he was a monstre sacré. “Since I’ve won the Oscar,” Humphrey told John, “I have tremendous
respect for your opinions, drunk or sober.” Still, John had to be given a hard time whenever possible. At the time of the purchase, he had suggested Lauren for a leading role in Beat the Devil. Humphrey sent a pseudo-angry letter to Ireland: “I read your insidious and immoral proposals to my wife. I have instructed Miss Bacall to disregard your blandishments and as your employer I implore you not to further fuck up my home, which has already been fucked up like Hell by Adlai Stevenson.”
He was not through complaining. John suggested that Billy Dannreuther, the Bogart role, should be a spiffily dressed dandy. “I’d like to see you a very Continental type fellow—an extreme figure in a homburg, shoulders unpadded, French cuffs, regency trousers, fancy waistcoats and a walking stick.” A second fulmination issued from Holmby Hills. “As regards your brilliant conception of my wardrobe, may I say that you’re full of shit.… As regards the cane, I don’t have to tell you what you can do with THAT!”
Humphrey and John did agree that Beat the Devil should be shot in Ravello, Italy, a town above the Amalfi coast with spectacular views of the Mediterranean. “It’s only money,” said Humphrey blithely, and off he went to get a look at the place. Huston, as usual, was on his own. Humphrey was forced to go it alone because Lauren was back in Hollywood filming How to Marry a Millionaire, co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable. Additional financing for Beat the Devil had been provided by an Italian concern, Robert Haggiag, and the Woolf brothers’ Romulus, based in Britain. A Huston production was never without complications; because of three streams of revenue, now they came in triplicate. Humphrey, who preferred to steer clear of the nuts and bolts of the film business, found himself immersed in budgets, schedules, and salaries. Lines of apprehension began to show in his face and temperament. As the opening day for filming approached, outbursts grew more frequent. Some were for effect; most were not.
The Italian sex symbol Gina Lollobrigida signed on to play Humphrey’s wife, with the proviso that in European theaters she would be billed over the title. Jennifer Jones, a delicate beauty married to producer David O. Selznick, agreed to be one of the schemers. To add color and eccentricity Santana hired Robert Morley, who had played Katharine Hepburn’s doomed brother in The African Queen. Both Humphrey and John regarded Peter Lorre as a talisman—he had appeared in two central Bogart films, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. They were very pleased when he became the fifth piece in their plan to make a new classic.
Casting was to be the easy part, the script the most difficult. Cockburn’s initial version was deemed unusable. Santana brought in a team of experienced screenwriters, Peter Viertel and Tony Veiller (The Killers; State of the Union). Their work went before the censorious Breen office, which found it wanton. As the scenario stood, Beat the Devil condoned the out-of-wedlock indecencies of the Bogart and Jones characters (he is married to a scheming Italian, she to an upper-class twit). Moreover, it made a “dashing, romantic and heroic” figure out of Billy Dannreuther, used scatological terms, and mentioned homosexuality—this at a time when director Otto Preminger was fighting for the right to have the words “virgin,” “seduce,” and “mistress” in the dialogue of his new comedy, The Moon Is Blue.
As it happened, Selznick was in Italy, completing the Jennifer Jones—Montgomery Clift vehicle, Indiscretion of an American Wife. Additional dialogue for that film had been supplied by the twenty-nine-year-old novelist and short story writer Truman Capote. The twee photograph of the author on the dust jacket of Other Voices, Other Rooms had attracted more attention than the prose within. Capote was still in Rome, living beyond his means. Selznick was impressed with the young man’s work and advised Huston that “his is one of the freshest and most original and most exciting talents of our time—and what he would say through these characters, and how he would have them say it, would be so completely different from anything that has been heard from a motion-picture theater’s sound box as to give you something completely fresh—or so at least I think.”
Selznick’s opinion was good enough for Huston. He hired Capote for fifteen hundred dollars a week, and suggested a new direction for the script. Recalled Truman, “Both John and I felt that the best thing to do was to kid the story as we went along. The only trouble was that shooting had to begin the following week.” In the few days before everyone went to work, the producer and director motored to the location in Ravello. On the way their chauffeur failed to make the proper turn and crashed into a stone wall. Riding without a seat belt, Humphrey was thrown forward, cracking a dental bridge and lacerating his tongue. The mouth wounds were stitched up sans anesthetic by a Neapolitan doctor. “Bogie had guts,” Huston said admiringly. “Not bravura. Real courage.” A week later a new bridge arrived from Los Angeles and everyone went to work, speaking dialogue that had been concocted on the spot.
That was not considered an insuperable obstacle. After all, Casablanca had been created under similar conditions, and everyone knew how well that had turned out. What people failed to realize was the simplest of truths: in Casablanca, human lives were at stake. As long as the protagonists were on the right side of the war, all sorts of morally questionable behavior could be permitted or excused. In Beat the Devil nothing was vital. It was all a game among thieves—and the writers of their dialogue. In Huston’s overview, “the crooks; ostensibly heroic people; the romance; even virtue, became absurd.”
But there was no other choice now; it was Capote or nothing. Truman made good on Selznick’s promise. Something completely different was delivered on a daily basis, often only twenty-four hours ahead of the shooting schedule. “I didn’t know how good it was, or how bad, or anything like that,” Huston recalled. “We all knew that it was something. We just went with it.” As Truman’s biographer Gerald Clarke observes, he packed his dialogue with everything he found funny, from Lollobrigida’s comic malapropisms to his favorite cinema clichés. Houston’s assistant John Barry Ryan thought that “it was all perfectly obvious that he was making a movie for his own amusement. I always meant to sit down with him and ask, ‘Truman, were you doing what we all thought you were doing? Was it all a game to you?’ ” Indeed it was, and the improvisatory form of the script was reflected in the private lives of everyone concerned with the movie.
The Lost One, Stephen D. Youngkin’s entertaining biography of Peter Lorre, quotes cinematographer Oswald Morris on the atmosphere in and around the set. One night while Humphrey and John were playing poker, an emergency message was delivered to their table: Jennifer Jones was sitting atop the wardrobe in her room, glassy-eyed and hysterical. Humphrey went upstairs to find Lorre lying in Jones’s bed, wearing a bright red flannel nightie, smoking a cigarette, and reading the paper. “She had come into the room, seen Peter there, screamed and leapt straight on top of the wardrobe and refused to come down until Bogart came up and got him out of her bed and apologized. So Bogie went up and fished Peter out of the bed. It was all a put-up job. That’s the sort of thing that went on.”
Ravello was not all that far from Rome, and a couple of celebrities passing through town took it upon themselves to make unannounced visits. Orson Welles dropped by, exchanged some words with his fellow director, and took off. Ingrid Bergman took the opportunity to say hello to her Casablanca co-star. Ingrid had scandalized Hollywood by abandoning her first husband and children to run off with Roberto Rossellini. Thereafter she became the lodestar of his movies. They had a minimal impact in Europe and none at all in the States. Yet she carried herself like a grande dame—as Alfred Hitchock had observed, Miss Bergman “only wanted to appear in masterpieces.” All this made her ripe for Humphrey’s reflexive needling, and he took full advantage of the opportunity. Was her conduct worth the price? Deep down, didn’t she regret wrecking her career? Reviled in the United States, no longer important in Europe, who was she now? Ingrid answered coolly, “I am a very happy woman and maybe that is just as important as being a box office success in America.” For once Humphrey had no comeback. When she left, he retreated to the jokey
atmosphere around the set, trying to banish thoughts about profits and losses. But they wouldn’t go away. The tension mounted, and the anxieties went public, showing up in his performance—in the tightness of the mouth, the weariness of the eyes, and the brusque, often unconvincing delivery of the lines.
Huston thought of the Robert Morley character as a latter-day Kasper Gutman, the Fat Man of Maltese Falcon. But Sydney Greenstreet had a twinkle and liked to mix with the other members of the cast. Morley detested practical jokes and found Lorre “an intensely tiresome little chap with quite the foulest vocabulary I have ever had the misfortune to listen to.” Rather than hear a nightly cascade of scatological words and off-color material, Robert took his meals in his room.
Both leading ladies fell short of expectations. Gina Lollobrigida, the top-heavy Italian sex symbol, was of no interest to Humphrey. He professed himself “not a bosom man” and referred to her as “the Refrigerator.” Gina’s great rival, Sophia Loren, cannily if bitchily observed that Gina was “good playing a peasant, but incapable of playing a lady”—something she was required to do here. Although Jones had a finishing school beauty, hers had been an irregular career. After playing radiant heroines in films like Since You Went Away and Cluny Brown, she appeared in a series of unprofitable films. She was miscast as a fiery half-breed in Duel in the Sun, and seemed out of place in the title role of Madame Bovary. Ruby Gentry, the story of a swamp girl in the Deep South, might have been more of the same had it not been for King Vidor’s strong direction. The feature pleased audiences and returned Jennifer to the elite group of bankable stars. Still, she had never been known for comic ability, and Capote’s daily contributions threw her off balance for most of the shoot. “I always wanted to know where my character was going,” Jones complained, “whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head … so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not to do.”
Tough Without a Gun Page 22
