Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  Lamentablemente, things are not as they appear. On their honeymoon she discovers that the count has suffered a disabling war wound not unlike that of Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Vincenzo is the last of his line, and Maria cannot bear the thought of the Torlato-Favrini line ending with her husband. An idea comes to her naïve mind and she spills it to Harry: she’ll take a lover, get pregnant by him, then present Vincenzo with an heir. Harry warns Maria not to go any further with this lunatic plan. His caveat comes too late; the count, jealous, suspicious of his new bride and her background of numerous affairs, finds her with his chauffeur and kills them both. The pop opera ends as it began, with the group of mourners saying their farewells to the barefoot contessa.

  Mank’s dialogue alternated between bitchy and literate. An envious blonde cases Maria and mumbles, “She hasn’t even got what I’ve got.” Replies Jerry, “What she’s got you couldn’t spell, and what you’ve got, you used to have.” When Maria observes that it’s difficult to believe she’s living in this day and age, Harry looks around at the displays of grandiose wealth and power: “What makes you think we’re living in this day and age?”

  But when the film was released, few cared about the smart banter. Columnists (and then the general public) considered the movie a celluloid guessing game. Was Maria Vargas a portrait of Rita Hayworth? Were the other characters also taken from real life? Was Bravano the Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa? Was Kirk Edwards meant to be Howard Hughes, the oddball aviator, industrialist, and owner of RKO Pictures? Secrets are not long-lived in Hollywood; shortly after the picture wrapped Hughes heard about the Edwards role and threatened a major lawsuit. He was just eccentric enough to follow through, forcing Mank to make some quick postproduction alterations. TWA, Hughes’s airline, provided a plane to fly film editor William Hornbeck across the Atlantic to rerecord bits of narration. In the process Edwards was changed from a “Texas tycoon” to a “Wall Street lion,” and a sequence in which he imprisons Maria—said later to be based on an incident involving Hughes and Gina Lollobrigida—was eliminated.

  All this tailoring came to very little. Mank had failed to do for the screen what he had done for the theater in All About Eve. The film might have been better received had it not run against another backstage drama, which opened at the same time around the country. It was a remake, and oddly enough Humphrey was a devotee of the original A Star Is Born, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. Every year, on his birthday, he screened it with tears streaming down his face at the fate of Norman Maine, a onetime matinee idol down on his luck. Richard Brooks, who was present at many of the private showings, remembered that Bogie wept bitterly on each occasion. “He associated himself with the Fredric March character, with his downfall and being unable to pull himself together. That was the only time I saw Bogie cry.” Asked why he was so obsessed with the film, Humphrey explained that he strongly identified with the Maine character: “I expected a lot more of myself, and I’m never going to get it.” Some of this was the Scotch talking. But much of it was prompted by the feeling that he had squandered too much of his talent, and made too many unwise choices. There was no going back now; the films were all in the can and he was certainly not one to complain in public. If his career was less than it should have been, so be it. He could still take pride in half a dozen classics of the American cinema. How many other actors could say the same? And yet no matter how many times Humphrey saw A Star Is Born, the Norman Maine scene prompted a melancholia he couldn’t dismiss or explain away as the self-pity of an aging drunk.

  The remake of the March-Gaynor movie featured a knockout song, “The Man That Got Away” by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, and a bravura turn by Judy Garland, backed by the poignant performance of James Mason. Garland used up all the raves that season. One writer was unkind enough to retitle Contessa “A Star Is Stillborn.” The other reviews were gentler but rarely more than tepid. In the New York Herald Tribune Otis L. Guernsey spoke for them all: “This movie has style in some places, and a certain flamboyance, but the level of its human drama is routine.”

  Humphrey knew he had turned in a sharp, credible performance as Dawes, a burned-out case seeking one last chance. But he also knew that this was Ava’s film, not his. Future prospects were ominous. He was in his midfifties, and there were inklings that from now on he would be relegated to character parts—much as Edward G. Robinson had been in Key Largo: Why not second billing? At fifty-three I was lucky to get any billing at all.

  Humphrey was not introspective by nature, and looked for compensation in the usual places—the bottle, the family, the pals who liked to drink as much as he did. The trouble was that grain alcohol could only go so far in elevating his spirits. When he was drunk enough, he would sit at a restaurant and complain that nobody sent him good scripts anymore, and that he was going to “go back to the boat and pack it in.” On occasion the children could lighten his mood, but he didn’t understand them very well. Leslie was only two; Stephen was five. When he spoke about his son to a friend, he confessed, “I guess maybe I had the kid too late in life. I just don’t know what to do about him. But I love him. I hope he knows that.” His fourth marriage was going well enough, yet he still paid visits to the increasingly realistic Verita Thompson. According to her memoir, “Bogie and I continued seeing each other because we wanted to, but after the birth of Stevie the talk of divorce all but ended, and with Leslie’s birth, it ended completely.” Friends managed to divert him from time to time, but they couldn’t produce another Maltese Falcon or Casablanca or African Queen. So there he was in 1954, in harness but dissatisfied with his professional status, a restive husband and father, feeling a bit more tired these days, seeking something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Was this the Big Fadeout, the way so many superstars had ended—in neglect and regret and obscurity? He didn’t want to think about it. It was too damn sad.

  BLACKLIST: The Committee for the First Amendment, including Bogart, Bacall, Danny Kaye, and Paul Henreid, gather in Washington, D.C., to protest the Hollywood investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. (photo credit i7.1)

  GOLD FEVER: Bogart smolders with suspicion as he contemplates Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, directed by Walter’s son John in 1948. (photo credit i7.2)

  LESSON IN LOVE: Director Nicholas Ray instructs Bogart in the ways of wooing co-star (and Ray’s real-life wife) Gloria Grahame on the set of In a Lonely Place (1950). (photo credit i7.3)

  ROMANCE IN AUTUMN: On the set of the grueling and colorful classic of late love, The African Queen, with Katharine Hepburn and director John Huston (1951). (photo credit i7.4)

  BEST ACTOR: For his performance as Charlie Allnut in The African Queen, Humphrey receives an Oscar from Claire Trevor at the twenty-fourth Academy Awards ceremony, 1952. (photo credit i7.5)

  CAMPING OUT: Bogart is baffled by his beautiful co-stars (as well as by the script) in one of the first camp movies, Beat the Devil, written by Truman Capote and misdirected by John Huston in 1953. (photo credit i7.6)

  NAVAL DEFEAT: Captain Queeg cracks under relentless cross-examination in The Caine Mutiny (1954). (photo credit i7.7)

  MISMATCH: Bogart, visibly uncomfortable playing a business tycoon, pursues Audrey Hepburn, the pixyish daughter of his chauffeur, in Sabrina (1954). (photo credit i7.8)

  FAMILY MAN: Humphrey, Lauren, and their children, six-year-old Stephen and three-year-old Leslie, on the set of The Desperate Hours (1955). (photo credit i7.9)

  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW: As a sportswriter in search of his conscience, Humphrey consoles a defeated boxer, played by wrestler-turned-actor Mike Lane in The Harder They Fall (1956). (photo credit i7.10)

  INFLUENCE: New Wave hero Jean-Paul Belmondo gazes admiringly at the image of Bogie in Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 homage to American gangster movies. (photo credit i7.11)

  CHAPTER 8

  Storm-Tossed by Fate

  i

  Humphrey’s melanch
olia made life difficult for those around him. Like most depressions, this one contained a great deal of anger, although the subject of Humphrey’s rage was never expressed in so many words. It had to do with diminishing respect from the new studio heads, with a lack of challenging film roles, and with something far more inexorable and demoralizing: increasing age. With these distresses in the back of his mind, even lighthearted subjects became weighted with sadness. When a friend asked if he had picked out a good prep school for his son, for example, Humphrey snapped, “Hell, no! I’ll be dead by then.” The remark was not meant as prophecy, just as a grim declaration. You went through life as two people, the mature, unyielding leading man—and the guy with thinning hair, diminishing teeth, and an overfondness for liquor, Chesterfields, and outrageous remarks. It was a collision course with reality, but that’s who you were, and that’s the way it was going to be.

  This pugnacious attitude did nothing to gratify Humphrey’s wish for one more great movie, one more memorable performance. He had his own gang of intimates, but some of the important people in the industry started to give him a wide berth, unsure of how steady Humphrey was these days. Would he be as difficult on the set as he was at a restaurant table? Would he come up with one of those astonishing star turns, or would he just try to get by? For that matter, could he still remember his lines?

  Humphrey had picked up a lot of detractors recently; it wouldn’t have hurt to spend a little time with studio chiefs, reminding them of his virtues. But he was too proud to beat his own drum, and retreated to the company of like-minded colleagues—actors, singers, and writers who had played the game in order to stay viable in the movie business, and who disliked themselves for doing it. In 1955, some twenty of them chartered a flight to Las Vegas to catch Noël Coward’s act at the Desert Inn. The leader was Frank Sinatra, and the manifest included the Bogarts, the David Nivens, Sid and Judy Luft, scenarist George Axelrod and his wife, producer Charles Feldman and model Capucine, songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen and actress Angie Dickinson, agent Irving Lazar and actress Martha Hyer, and inevitably, Prince Mike Romanoff and his Princess Gloria.

  The prince was emblematic of his surroundings. Harry Gerguzin had passed from Bolshevik Russia to the United States, where he spent time in orphanages, got arrested for various misdemeanors in New York City, journeyed to Paris and London, where he plunged into more trouble (Scotland Yard had him down as “a rogue of uncertain nationality”), toured the capitals of Europe, and went back to New York, nourishing big dreams all the way. But in the New World the only job he could find was pressing pants in the back of a Brooklyn tailoring establishment. Amid the clouds of steam, an inspired idea came to him. Overseas, Harry had seen many a White Russian aristocrat reduced to driving a cab or waiting on tables. Why not leave New York, where there were too many other immigrants from the Pale? Why not go west, start fresh, put on airs, and claim to be a Slavic nobleman? He was fluent in several languages, including English, which he spoke with a bogus Oxonian intonation. If he claimed to be Prince Michael Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky-Romanoff, nephew of Tsar Nicholas II, who was there to say nay?

  Nowhere in America could Harry have found so hospitable a climate. The Napoleonic (five-foot, five-inch) émigré was right at home in Hollywood, where pretenders have always been as much a part of the town as palmettos. In 1939, backed by actors and directors, “Prince Michael,” sporting a Marine crew cut and a civilian smile, opened Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills. The imperial R was emblazoned on the front door. The prince was the restaurant’s boniface, maître d’, chess maven, raconteur, and lender of money to those down on their luck. His place caught on straightaway, not least because most movie people had come from humble backgrounds and reinvented themselves. They knew a pretender when they saw one and they liked his style. Humphrey, who made a habit of lambasting phonies, gloried in the company of the most blatant imposter of them all. He had his own booth near the door, where he met friends, consumed his customary lunch of a cheese omelet washed down with Scotch, and, when things quieted down, played high-level chess with the prince. By 1947, Romanoff’s had become a required tourist stop, like Schwab’s drugstore or the Walk of Fame. In the film Miracle on 34th Street, Kris Kringle is hauled before a psychiatrist for insisting he’s the authentic Saint Nicholas from the real North Pole. The doctor dismisses Kringle’s claim as a harmless fantasy. Why, he goes on, thousands of people have similar delusions, living completely normal lives in every other respect. “A famous example is that fellow—I can’t think of his name. For years, he’s insisted he’s a Russian prince.” Is the man in an institution? inquires Kringle’s boss. “No. He owns a famous restaurant in Hollywood.”

  Now, as the Hollywood cronies sat back in their banquettes at the Desert Inn in Vegas, they consumed whiskey and mixed drinks, loudly cheering Noël Coward’s renditions of favorites like “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” “I’ll See You Again,” and “Uncle Harry’s Not a Missionary Now.” Humphrey, Lauren, Prince Michael, Judy, and all the others raised glasses to the singer’s health. Then they drank to their own health. Then to the health of absent friends. Then they began the cycle all over again. Somewhere along the way, the prince took a close look at Humphrey. “Bogart,” he concluded, “is a first-class person with an obsessive compulsion to behave like a second-class person.” The roistering went on for four days. Contemplating the multiple hangovers, listening to the groans and promises of sermons and soda water from now on, Lauren informed them that they looked “like a god damn rat pack.”

  The sobriquet stuck. The members of the pack formalized their roles, as if they were all in the same movie. Frank Sinatra was named Pack Master; Judy Garland, First Vice President; Lauren Bacall, Den Mother; Sid Luft, Cage Master; Irving Lazar, Recording Secretary; Nathaniel Benchley, Historian; and Humphrey Bogart, Rat in Charge of Public Relations. Joe Hyams’s syndicated column quoted Humphrey on the purpose of the organization: “The relief of boredom and the perpetuation of independence.” To underline that phrase, Benchley designed a letterhead for Pack stationery. It showed a rat gnawing a human hand—presumably the one that fed it. Beneath the drawing was the legend “Never Rat on a Rat,” an oblique reference to the blacklist days of the previous decade. Most of the Rats had a celebrity that reached beyond Hollywood. Singly they had always been given space in the papers and time on television. Soon, all around the globe, the Pack would enjoy a notoriety larger than the sum of its parts. They made the most of it, wisecracking, mocking tradition, appearing drunk, or pretending to be drunk, whenever a camera was around.

  But not everyone was a fan. Columnist Hedda Hopper tried to wangle invitations to the group’s parties; she was refused entrance. Of course she wrote disapprovingly of the Pack; predictably this added to public curiosity. The more reclusive and insular they were, the more Humphrey & Co. got space in newspapers, with breathless reportage about the glamorous names who had turned their backs on fame. Before long the Pack’s activities were the subject of articles in European papers, something that irritated nonfans like the conservative movie star William Holden, who had disliked Humphrey since Sabrina. He complained that as a film star he represented America, and that his job was made difficult when he journeyed overseas. Foreigners were forever asking him about the Rats. “In every barrel there’s bound to be a rotten apple,” he assured them. “Not all actors are bad. It may sound stuffy and dull, but it is quite possible for people to have social intercourse without resorting to a Rat Pack.” Naturally the Pack delighted in such antagonists, thumbing their noses at Holden and anyone else they considered stuffy and dull. They maintained a tight insularity, barring all but a few iconoclastic guests from either end of the sexual scale. The unabashedly gay Clifton Webb, a colleague from Humphrey’s days on Broadway, was admitted. So was Mickey Rooney, MGM’s much-married juvenile. In general the Pack avoided any interviewer they couldn’t control. Edward R. Murrow, seemingly the most independent newsman in America, was ideal for Humphrey’s purpose.

 
It was said around the network that there were two Murrows, the High Ed and the Low Ed. The High Ed confronted Senator Joe McCarthy in March 1954, on See It Now (“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home”). The Low Ed hosted the weekly program Person to Person, paying calls on overexposed celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano, pianist Wladziu Liberace, and, in September 1954, the Bogart family. If audiences expected lip from the guest they were disappointed. The politesse was prearranged. Scrutinizing the TV monitor in New York, Murrow saw what millions of watchers did: a slender middle-aged man in polo shirt, jacket, and slacks, with his pretty, intelligent wife, informally dressed in blouse and pants. Humphrey was asked softball questions about his career on the stage and in film; Murrow inquired about the gold bracelet Lauren wore on her wrist. She showed off the little charm, a tiny whistle commemorating her line in To Have and Have Not. Then the Bogart children were brought on to win viewers over and reinforce the image of Humphrey as a reformed rogue, a man whom you could now trust with your nubile daughter or your little grandchildren. He and Murrow smoked away, but drinking was not mentioned. Reviewing the show, Variety called the Bogarts “a literate, witty, engaging couple,” and in her column Louella Parsons praised Humphrey as seen on TV: “The ‘bad boy’ is becoming a very sedate citizen of the town.”