Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  One outburst would be mimicked by impressionists for the next fifty years. To corner Queeg, Lieutenant Greenwald refers to several incidents over the past year. The captain ran over his own towline. The captain put a yellow dye in the water to guide the small boats carrying invading GIs to shore—and then turned tail rather than face enemy fire. The captain was informed that a quart of strawberries had been stolen by the mess boys but refused to believe it. When he was a midshipman, he had caught a man with a makeshift key to the kitchen, and insisted that a seaman had done the same thing here. Queeg therefore ordered his officers to do a full-scale investigation from midnight to dawn. Ruthlessly prodded by Greenwald, he lurches into a monologue about past transgressions and accusations:

  But they encouraged the crew to go around scoffing at me and spreading wild rumors about steaming in circles and—and then “Old Yellowstain”—I was to blame for Lieutenant Maryk’s incompetence and poor seamanship. Lieutenant Maryk was the perfect officer, but not Captain Queeg. Ah, but the strawberries! That’s where I had them. I proved with … geometric logic that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist, and I’d have produced that key if they hadn’t pulled the Caine out of action. I-I-I know now that they were only trying to protect some fellow officers.

  Queeg suddenly snaps out of his trance and looks around him, as if he, along with the court, had been listening to an obsessive and irresponsible commander. “Naturally,” he says in a chagrined and melancholy voice, “I can only cover these things from memory. If I’ve left anything out, just ask me specific questions and I’ll be glad to answer them one by one.”

  Lieutenant Greenwald has accomplished what he set out to do: destroy the captain’s credibility and, in the process, the captain himself. No further questions are required; Queeg has been revealed as unstable and unfit to command. The court-martial is over. But not the drama. At a party celebrating their vindication, Keefer appears. “I didn’t think you’d have the guts to show up,” Maryk mutters. Replies Keefer, “I didn’t have the guts not to.”

  Greenwald also shows up, drunk and angry at himself for breaking Queeg: “I had to torpedo him. And I feel sick about it.” When one of the officers demurs, he rambles on. “When I was studying law, and Mr. Keefer was writing his stories, and Willie was tearing up the playing fields of Princeton, who was standing guard over this country of ours? Not us. We knew you couldn’t make any money in the service. Who did the dirty work for us? Queeg did.” When one of the acquitted men argues that Queeg endangered the lives of the crew, Greenwald counters, “He didn’t endanger any lives. You did. At one point Queeg came to you for help, and you turned him down. He wasn’t worthy of your loyalty. So you turned on him. You made up songs about him. If you’d been loyal to Queeg, do you think all this would have come up?” Greenwald exits with a histrionic gesture, flinging the contents of his glass in Keefer’s face. The only reason the scene works is because Humphrey has given Queeg a tragic stature. Although the captain is absent, his disintegration marks everyone in the room.

  The Hollywood Reporter judged Bogart’s “infinitely pathetic performance” to be “a high point in the history of screen acting.” Time had put Humphrey on its cover during the making of The Caine Mutiny. The article, headlined THE SURVIVOR, stated that in the process of making sixty-eight pictures, Bogart had acquired a brassy air of confidence and command. “He deliberately gives Queeg the mannerisms and appearance of an officer of sternness and decision, then gradually discloses him as a man who is bottling up a scream.”

  Humphrey needed this film more than he was willing to say to Dmytryk or to his fellow actors. He considered his last movie to be a cringe-making loser, and though he liked to scoff at reviewers, he secretly believed they were right about Beat the Devil. When the raves came in about his performance as Captain Queeg, he could no longer pretend that critics didn’t count, that the only important things were the rapt attention of audiences and the sum total of box office receipts. He collected the reviews and showed them around. One afternoon he and Spencer Tracy were knocking a few back. Tracy provoked him as usual: “Hey, you’re not an actor.” Humphrey rose to the bait, but this time he let others answer for him. “Here,” he said, producing his good notices. “Look at these.” Tracy pretended not to be impressed. But he was, and so was the friend he had been kidding. Humphrey began to feel a new surge of confidence. All right, he had made a mistake with the Huston-Capote movie, but that was just a speed bump. He breathed easier these days; The Caine Mutiny had proved that he was still box office material. He had some doubts about his next movie. Was a comedy the right thing to do after a wartime melodrama? Certainly it would test his versatility, but did he really need to take another test at the age of fifty-five? Maybe so.

  iv

  Sabrina fair,

  Listen where thou art sitting

  Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

  In twisted braids of lilies knitting

  The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;

  Listen for dear honor’s sake,

  Goddess of the silver lake,

  Listen and save!

  John Milton’s lines flattered those who bought tickets to Samuel Taylor’s sophisticated Broadway comedy. Starring Margaret Sullavan and Joseph Cotton, Sabrina Fair was one of the bright spots of the 1953 season. The sprightly dialogue and timeworn plot were in the tradition of Philip Barry’s Philadelphia Story and Holiday, and S. N. Behrman’s No Time for Comedy. The daughter of the Larrabee family’s chauffeur leaves for Paris as a gawky teenager and returns as a lovely young woman. Once she had a crush on the Larrabees’ flamboyant son David; now she falls for his older brother, Linus, a stuffy businessman whom she liberates and brings to life—all very well for a 1930s play, but hardly the material for a midcentury Hollywood smash.

  Nonetheless, Billy Wilder bought the play in the belief that it only needed his touch to become a commercial property. Wilder was one of the shrewdest writer-directors in the business; one of his tricks was to use an actor in an unaccustomed role: silent-movie queen Gloria Swanson as a self-deluding star in Sunset Boulevard, for example, or Barbara Stanwyck as a steamy, lethal blonde in Double Indemnity, along with the all-American Fred MacMurray as her dupe. Wilder’s first choice for the role of the senior Larrabee was Cary Grant, who would have given Linus his inimitable jaunty style. Late in the game, Grant turned out to be unavailable. Billy chose to cast against part yet again, and asked Humphrey Bogart to take the role. Humphrey was well aware that he was the director’s second choice and dragged his feet for more than a month. Ultimately he allowed two agents, Sam Jaffe and Irving Lazar, to talk him into it. They reminded him that Paramount was not Columbia; the studio was quite willing to pay the full Bogart salary of $200,000.

  Humphrey would have many reasons to regret this decision. In the first place, his co-stars and director were cliquish and unfriendly to those outside their circle. The year before, Audrey Hepburn had won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in William Wyler’s brief, delirious romance of a princess and a commoner, Roman Holiday. The same evening William Holden took home the Best Actor Oscar for his gritty performance as the hero of Stalag 17, a prisoner-of-war picture directed by Wilder. Hepburn, Holden, and Wilder formed a triumvirate, with private jokes and references that rendered Humphrey an outsider. The camera loved Hepburn’s delicate beauty, and she enchanted almost every male on the set—except for Humphrey. He considered her a novice, vastly overindulged by her director. Audrey was “all right,” he observed flatly, “as long as you like to do thirty-six takes.” He also had very little use for Holden, whom he regarded as a flat-out hypocrite. Despite the fact that William was married, he liked to carry on with his co-stars, including Hepburn. He also let it be known that he didn’t like Humphrey’s drinking habits (although he later became an alcoholic himself), and made it clear that as a conservative Republican he considered his co-star’s politics to be both naïve and radical.

  In the
second place, Humphrey thought the script had an arch tone that did nothing to enhance the Bogart image. It was all very well for Cary Grant to play opposite a kid; he was only four years younger than Humphrey, but as everybody knew, Cary was ageless. Every one of Humphrey’s fifty-four years showed in the topography of his face. At twenty-four, Audrey Hepburn had the affect of a gamine barely out of her teens. Humphrey considered the April-November romance unseemly, even though Audrey was only five years younger than Lauren.

  And then there was the matter of the Bogart wardrobe. The man who once exploded when John Huston tried to turn him into a toff was now required to wear dark suits and a homburg for the role of Linus. Discomfort became a constant companion through seven weeks of shooting.

  Like Humphrey, the forty-eight-year-old Wilder had a penchant for needling anyone in a position to challenge his authority. After a difficult moment, the director confronted Humphrey: “I examine your ugly face, Bogie; I look at the valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face, and I know that somewhere under the sickening face of a shit—is a real shit.” Humphrey retaliated with deeds as well as words. At precisely 6:00 p.m., as his contract stipulated, he had a Scotch and water and walked off the set even if he was in the middle of a scene. The two men might have made interesting dinner guests or debaters on a talk show, but as colleagues they were a disaster. Wilder was the kind of director Humphrey found difficult to work with: “He works with the writer and excludes the actor.” In his customary style, Wilder constantly brought new pages of dialogue to the set. One scene was written by the three collaborators, Wilder, Ernest Lehman, and Samuel Taylor, during their lunch hour. It was shot that afternoon in seventy-two takes. As the pages arrived, Humphrey went into attack mode. He did bad imitations of Wilder’s Viennese accent (“Vould you mind translating that into English? I don’t shpeak so good ze Cherman”) and asked whether the director had any children. Informed that Billy had a thirteen-year-old daughter, he inquired, “Did she write this?” Humphrey condemned the entire script as “a crock of shit” and said that now he understood how Ingrid Bergman felt in Casablanca. “I didn’t know what the end of the picture would be,” he was to recall. “I got sick and tired of who gets Sabrina.”

  Billy began by labeling Humphrey “evil, a bore, a coward, a man who would run like a weasel.” As the weeks ground on, though, the director acquired a grudging respect for the actor. Bogart, he told a reporter, is “an extremely competent s.o.b.” He shows up “on time, but completely unprepared,” yet, “having looked at the particular scene about to be shot for a few minutes, he knows his lines. He never blows them.” His work emerges “in short spurts and it looks like a whole thought-out conception when it comes out.”

  Wilder might have been discussing his own contributions. They were also delivered in short spurts—the rewriting got to be so intense that Samuel Taylor walked out—but seemed to be all of a piece once the film had been edited. What the director could not remove was his penchant for bizarre casting, no matter how inappropriate the performer. Only two years after making Sabrina he co-wrote and directed another film about the pursuit of a young woman by an older man. Love in the Afternoon, also starring Audrey Hepburn, did nothing for her career and made the fifty-five-year-old Gary Cooper look uncomfortable and embarrassed in the role of an international playboy.

  Instead of presenting the comedy in a straightforward manner, Wilder forced Sabrina into a coy fairy tale. His version began with Hepburn’s soft voice intoning, “Once upon a time on the North Shore of Long Island, some thirty miles from New York, there lived a small girl on a large estate.…” Audrey had little experience before the camera—this was only her second American movie—and Billy had no wish to change her in any way. In Sabrina she was the same self-consciously dewy-eyed ingenue of Roman Holiday, except that in the latter film she wore costumes by Edith Head; in the former her wardrobe was designed by Hubert de Givenchy.

  Humphrey, on the other hand, was bullied into abandoning his assertive style in favor of a light, sardonic delivery. In the end, he reluctantly did as he was told; in Wilder’s words, Bogart “took it, played it, and bitched.” Not that it mattered. Wilder’s reputation preceded him, and Humphrey was essentially given a pass by the reviewers. They were too kind. For despite the appearance of two older men—John Williams as Sabrina’s father, former silent-screen icon Francis X. Bushman as a tycoon—Humphrey never appeared to be rejuvenated by Audrey. From the opening shot to the final credits there was not a scintilla of a spark between them. He looked too stiff and old for her; she looked too lithe and young for him. It was impossible to imagine them in bed. Yet in 1954, when the Lone Ranger was making his farewell radio appearance, the Miss America pageant was broadcast on television for the first time, and the words “under God” were officially inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, Sabrina passed for urbane entertainment. Despite its creaky foundation, despite Audrey’s arch portrait of a female faun and Humphrey’s unpersuasive impersonation of a workaholic executive, it turned a neat profit. Rather than continue a feud that would only serve to damage their reputations, Bogart and Wilder found a way to reconcile. They acknowledged a mutual, if grudging, respect, and in time were seen at the same parties chatting away as if neither had ever uttered a cross word. But they never worked together again.

  Whatever the shortcomings of his most recent film, Humphrey was by every measure a pantheon figure with wealth, celebrity, and an important body of work. He could easily have taken a break, played with his young children, sailed leisurely to Catalina and back, visited old friends in New York. Perhaps if he had paid more attention to his racking cough, he would have slowed down. But that was not Humphrey’s way. He felt the need to secure his position. Joseph Mankiewicz provided the opportunity. The writer-director’s 1950 film, All About Eve, had received six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and Mank, as he was known around the studios, believed he had come up with another big winner.

  The Barefoot Contessa, scripted by Mank, is a fictive biography of a recently deceased Spanish actress, Maria Vargas, charting the pleasures and sorrows of her rise from peasantry to royalty. Told in the manner of Citizen Kane (perhaps not coincidentally, Joseph’s brother Herman Mankiewicz had co-written the screenplay for that picture), Contessa uses flashbacks and eyewitness accounts to recollect Maria’s jumbled life. Mank gave nothing away, but as various members of the cast signed on, Humphrey—and many another reader—saw Contessa as a scenario à clef. The title role would be played by Ava Gardner. It was not hard to imagine her as Maria: her father had been a North Carolina sawmill worker and her mother a domestic, yet before the age of thirty Ava had married three times and become a major film star as well as an international sex symbol; as if to remind herself of her humble origins, she delighted in going barefoot at toney restaurants and nightclubs.

  But Ava’s life and career did not really run parallel to the contessa’s. True, both women had many affairs and husbands; both drank too much; both were suffocated by their celebrity. But the basic model for Maria was Margarita Carmen Cansino, the Latin vaudeville dancer who changed her name to Rita Hayworth, became a major film actress at the age of twenty-five, and stayed in the front ranks for years, briefly abandoning her film career to wed Prince Aly Khan.

  Two unknowns were considered for the part, but neither the Briton Joan Collins nor the Italian Rosanna Podesta had the quality Mank was looking for. Contessa needed someone with an exotic beauty, talent to match, and proven box office appeal. It soon became clear that only one woman would do. The problem was, Ava Gardner was under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The year before, Mank had directed Julius Caesar for that studio and during the filming had clashed with production executives over budgets and timetables. Now they struck back. He could have Ava, if he paid MGM $200,000 plus 10 percent of the gross. They got what they wanted. So did Mank. With Humphrey Bogart playing Harry Dawes, a washed-up director newly on the wagon, Edmond O’Brien as the sycophantic publicist Oscar M
uldoon, and an experienced cast of character actors, he was ready to make a mordant commentary on the wasteland of Hollywood and the playgrounds of international high society.

  The film opens on the rain-soaked funeral of Countess Maria Torlato-Favrini, set in a Roman cemetery. In flashbacks, Harry and Oscar summon up Maria’s early, middle, and late days. They begin with a low point in Harry’s professional life. He has one last hope: Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens). The billionaire is on track to produce his first movie, and allows Harry to come along for the ride. All that it costs the director is his own dignity and self-respect. For Edwards is a man who enjoys humiliating anyone who works for him—especially Oscar Muldoon, a figure soaked in flop sweat.

  The trio visit a Spanish dive to catch Maria’s dance routine, agree that she’s a seedling superstar, and offer to plant her in Los Angeles. There she enjoys instant success, attended by a series of personal travails. The worst of them is an inability to find love. She envies Harry’s happy marriage to Jerry (Elizabeth Sellars), while the men in her own life offer nothing but misery. Edwards is an emotionally stunted figure, out for instant gratification. On a trip to Europe she abandons him for Alberto Bravano (Marius Goring), a South American wastrel who, it turns out, is only interested in acquiring another sex toy. At a gambling table Bravano goes on a losing streak and publicly blames Maria for his bad luck. Out of the crowd steps the gallant Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), who offers his arm. At last Maria has found her Prince Charming.