Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  One of Louella’s typical effusions, but Humphrey was beginning to assume a greater responsibility as a father and husband. At the end of 1954 he sold Santana Productions to Columbia Pictures for one million dollars. His financial manager, Morgan Maree, showed him the check. Humphrey borrowed it for the afternoon, temporarily abandoning his anti-Hollywood stance, waving the little piece of paper around to friends lunching at Romanoff’s. He got a kick out of those seven figures, but the joy swiftly wore off. He had no intention of buying some ridiculously extravagant car or boat or house. As far as Humphrey was concerned, the money wasn’t really his. It was a legacy, something for Lauren and Stephen and Leslie. “An actor lives in a world of anxiety and insecurity,” he told his friend Joe Hyams. “He can’t spread his big-money years over a lifetime like a businessman. He has to grab the bundle while he can. It’s his only defense.” Spoken like a man whose own father had left him with his debts, outstanding IOUs that Humphrey honorably paid to the last cent. That would never happen to Stephen and Leslie. Humphrey made a copy of the million-dollar check, and hung it on the wall of his den. The house was proof that Humphrey Bogart was a good provider. The check reminded visitors that he always would be.

  ii

  The racking cough could no longer be masked; on several occasions scenes had to be held up until Humphrey regained his breath after an attack. The lines under his eyes and around his mouth had deepened severely in the last year. He also appeared to be suffering from “smoker’s skin,” a grayish pallor, accompanied by pronounced lines under the eyes and around the mouth. Cigarette consumption was something he rationalized: without butts he would gain weight; besides, they were part of his image. Drinking was more fun to talk about. Scotch, he blithely informed a reporter, “is a very valuable part of my life.” It was all very well for him to joke about his habits, but he could see the results in the mirror, and they were not reassuring. In the small hours he reflected on some bitter truths: Humphrey Bogart, the most durable of the old superstars, was now a hard-to-cast leading man slipping from first place and hungry for a job. Happily, even if he was losing his teeth and hair, his timing was still intact. At this dark moment, Paramount made an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  In 1955 Alfred Hayes’s The Desperate Hours was running on Broadway. The drama starred the veteran Karl Malden as Daniel Hilliard, head of a family held hostage by the gunman Glenn Griffin, played by a gifted young actor named Paul Newman. The year before, Humphrey had tried to purchase the property. But Paramount had outbid Santana. Resigned to the situation, he shrugged: “If I can’t buy it at least I can be in it.” The role of Griffin was ideal for him. It would have been unthinkable to cast other stars of his generation in the part. Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, and the rest had played nice guys for most of their careers. Although James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson were still capable of projecting narrow-eyed villainy, they were seeking to change their images. Cagney had gone back to hoofing in the musical The Seven Little Foys, where he would impersonate George M. Cohan for the second time, and Robinson had signed to play the Hebrew leader Dathan in Cecil B. DeMille’s upcoming remake of The Ten Commandments.

  Humphrey had the field all to himself. He was twenty-five years older than Newman, but the desperado could be any age, and Humphrey intended to play him as a more mature, and therefore more threatening, Duke Mantee. He also had another idea about casting: what if Spencer Tracy played Daniel Hilliard? The two men hadn’t been in a film together for more than twenty years. He and Spence loved to kid each other from adjoining booths at Romanoff’s; when passersby asked Humphrey who was the best film actor in America, he pointed to himself but added that Tracy was a close runner-up. Spencer would say the same thing, putting his own name first and Bogart’s second.

  Initially Tracy showed some interest, but when it came time to commit he signed instead for the lead in Bad Day at Black Rock. Fredric March took the role. Humphrey shrugged off the disappointment and got to work. The director of Desperate Hours was William Wyler, a demanding, expert craftsman who had guided Humphrey through Dead End eighteen years earlier. He kept to a tight schedule, accommodating the Bogart contract, which specified that his workday ended at 6:00 p.m. but getting every erg from his star—and from the supporting cast—until the lights went off. Desperate Hours had a pounding, suspenseful plot, and a lineup of superb actors. Humphrey’s fellow outlaws were played by Dewey Martin as Griffin’s handsome and unlucky younger brother and Robert Middleton as a moronic sociopath. The ur—middle class Griffin family (the exterior of the house was later used for the 1950s and ’60s TV series Leave It to Beaver) was headed by March and the veteran actress Martha Scott. Mary Murphy played their attractive adolescent daughter, Gig Young her fiancé, Richard Eyer her bratty brother. Arthur Kennedy was the deputy sheriff who tracks the villains to their lair.

  Wyler and Joseph Hayes, who had written the novel, the play, and the film script, were faced with an insoluble dilemma. The black-and-white movie, filmed in wide-screen VistaVision, needed to be “opened up” with exterior scenes. But in doing so it would lose the tight, claustrophic atmosphere that had made Desperate Hours so suspenseful as a book and as a theater piece. To emphasize the human drama Wyler shuttled between the innocent and the malevolent, concentrating on faces that registered hostility and fear. But the dialogue and the characters often seemed at odds. Martin tries to make a move on the winsome Murphy, but never steps out of line (“I taught you everything you know,” says the older brother. “Yeah,” Martin admits, “everything except how to behave in a house like this”). Middleton is all blather and no action. Bogart threatens Fredric March with his customary authority—“If you pull anything, Hilliard, I’ll let you watch me kick the kid’s face in”—but he tolerates the boy’s annoying behavior until the sadism seems histrionic, something out of a paperback thriller. So does the finale. After a plot twist, Daniel Hilliard confronts Griffin. Now he has the upper hand, and holds a gun on the brute who has terrified his family. Griffin dares him to shoot, certain that this middle-class househusband hasn’t got murder in him. Hilliard disagrees: “I got it in me. You put it there.” A good line, but not quite believable. Though the reviews for Desperate Hours praised the actors and the direction, almost all of them addressed the subject of credibility, and almost all of them had a point. What worked on the stage seemed hokey on the screen. Hilliard’s dilemma wasn’t agonizing, it was only melodramatic; the confrontation of good folk and malefactors wasn’t terrifying, it was only histrionic.

  The movie didn’t thrive at the box office, which prompted Humphrey to blame the disappointment on Momism. That word was coined by Philip Wylie in his 1942 screed Generation of Vipers, but it got a new life when the book was republished in 1955: “When we agreed upon the American Ideal Woman, the Dream Girl of National Adolescence, the Queen of Bedpan Week, the Pin-up, the Glamour Puss—we insulted women and disenfranchised millions from love. Thus we made Mom. The hen-harpy is but the Cinderella chick come home to roost: the taloned, cackling residue of burnt-out puberty in a land that has no use for mature men or women.” According to Humphrey, if Desperate Hours didn’t turn out to be the expected box office bonanza, well, “maybe it was because of the dignity label on the film—they didn’t let people know it was a gangster film. Maybe it’s because of Momism these days, and no one cares if Pop is in danger of having his head bashed in.” Maybe. But it was more likely that audiences wanted to see Pop in a new light, the way he was in The Caine Mutiny, or The African Queen, or even Beat the Devil. What they didn’t want to see anymore was Humphrey Bogart in a Humphrey Bogart picture.

  iii

  Very little time lapsed between The Desperate Hours and the next Bogart film, financed and distributed by Twentieth Century Fox. The Left Hand of God had once been the property of Warner Bros., and Fox production chief Darryl Zanuck sought to rework the script to fit the star. “We should take more advantage of the Humphrey Bogart type,” he wrote in a memo to the
scriptwriter. The dialogue was “written a trifle too much like a straight leading man. He should be more cynical, hard-boiled and a trifle more bitter.” And it was done.

  Humphrey and director Edward Dmytryk had meshed well in The Caine Mutiny; no period of adjustment was required when they began working on Left Hand. The film was based on a novel by William Barrett and adapted by Alfred Hayes, but it was clearly a province of Graham Greeneland. In wartime China, a Roman Catholic priest, Father Jim Carmody, shows up in a remote mountain village. The cynical, hard-boiled, bitter cleric joins the efforts of missionaries Beryl Sigman (Agnes Moorehead), her husband, David (E. G. Marshall), and their recently widowed nurse, Anne Scott (Gene Tierney). Before long the priest and the nurse find themselves attracted to each other. She is ashamed of her feelings; he is uncomfortable about his. For Carmody is not a priest after all; he’s an American soldier of fortune, a pilot on the run from his ex-boss, corrupt warlord Mieh Yang (Lee J. Cobb).

  In the 1950s Caucasian actors were still playing Asians, as they had in the 1930s and ’40s when Peter Lorre was the Japanese detective Mr. Moto, and Sidney Toler was the Chinese sleuth Charlie Chan. Marlon Brando would impersonate Sakini, Okinawan narrator of The Teahouse of the August Moon, so it was not unusual for Cobb to play Yang, it was merely appalling. His bullet head shaven, Cobb lumbers around, throwing the picture off balance. Toward the finale, when Yang confronts Jim and they roll dice for the future of the village, the drama slides into unintentional farce. Still, Left Hand’s lack of distinction could not wholly be blamed on Cobb. Gene Tierney’s elegant carriage and exquisite face—“a fortune in cheekbones,” as the columns had it—had made her a luminary. Over the course of a decade she had worked for some of the most celebrated directors in Hollywood, including Ernst Lubitsch, John Ford, Rouben Mamoulian, and Otto Preminger. But during many of those productions she suffered through attacks of severe depression. They had occurred and reoccurred since she gave birth to a child with serious disabilities. In 1943, then married to designer Oleg Cassini, she was ecstatic to learn that she was pregnant. During a visit to the Hollywood Canteen to raise money for GIs she contracted rubella (German measles). The infant, Antoinette Daria, was born prematurely, suffering from deafness, partial blindness, and severe mental retardation. Years later a woman confessed that though she had come down with German measles, she had broken quarantine to come to the canteen that night. She spoke to her idol, impulsively hugged her, and disappeared into the crowd. Tierney’s autobiography, Self-Portrait, recalls that moment, and its result. After Antoinette’s birth, she wrote, “I didn’t care whether ever again I was anyone’s favorite actress.” On the set of Left Hand she kept blowing lines, retreating into herself, sometimes breaking into tears. Humphrey, who had seen a sister in the throes of mental illness (postpartum depression), warned the studio bosses that Gene was sick and needed help. “They assumed I was a trouper,” the actress wrote, “and was aware how much had been invested in the film and would not let them down. They suggested that Bogart be kind and gentle. He was nothing less. His patience and understanding carried me through the film.” Before it wrapped she consulted a doctor. When Left Hand was done, she flew to New York and checked into Harkness Pavilion, beginning a long and agonizing period of therapy. Tierney’s instability rarely affected her on-camera radiance, but her timing was off for most of the picture, and the romance of Anne and Jim never jelled.

  Fox publicists had no idea how to promote the film. Humphrey had walked through his part, obviously miscast as a bogus father figure. If the part made him uncomfortable, the taglines for Left Hand gave him the creeps: “The strangest covenant between God and man ever made!”; “He profaned the cloth he wore! She fought against a forbidden relationship!” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops took no offense; it rightly wrote the picture off as trivia: “The conflict between pilot and bandit has some interest but the priestly masquerade and the romantic feelings it arouses in a mission aide are pure Hollywood hokum.” Professional reviewers showed the same disregard. Although The New Yorker praised Humphrey as an actor who “maintained over the years a singularly decent standard in his work for Hollywood,” the magazine had little use for his latest effort. Other critics put the movie down as an “unconvincing demonstration of the ennoblement of a renegade” and one with a questionable moral: “If a young woman falls in love with a priest, she should not give up hope of marrying him and living happily ever after. It will probably turn out, after all, that the priest is really just some nice hardened criminal in disguise.” The Bogart who could always spot a poseur had lost his way. Partly it was because he felt increasingly ill, short of breath, beset by coughing episodes that could go on for five minutes at a time. He had no inclination to weigh alternatives, to think things through. And partly it was because he had an almost pathological desire to keep working, a need that had nothing to do with money, or even with reputation, a need as urgent as his craving for cigarettes.

  iv

  Less than a genius, more than a foreman, Michael Curtiz had collected seven Academy Award nominations and one Oscar over the course of three decades. Curtiz’s Homeric wrangling with Jack Warner had come to an unpleasant end; these days he was freelancing for any studio that would pay his salary. Paramount hired him to direct the adaptation of a Broadway hit, We’re No Angels, itself an adaptation of a French stage comedy. Humphrey had already been signed; so had a cast of bright supporting actors, including Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov, Joan Bennett, Basil Rathbone, and Leo G. Carroll. The names Curtiz and Bogart were forever associated with one of the most memorable American films of all time, Casablanca, and Paramount had reason to believe that Angels could become another classic. It even had a preliminary treatment by Julius Epstein, one of the writers on Casablanca.

  By rehearsal time, however, many changes had been wrought in the adaptation of Sam and Bella Spewak’s play. The new script was written by Ranald MacDougall, best known for scenarios of the drama Mildred Pierce (also directed by Curtiz) and the Clifton Webb babysitting farce Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell. In a way, MacDougall’s résumé foreshadowed the flaws to follow. Curtiz was known for wit rather than exaggerated comedy, and Bogart had not engaged in slapstick and heavy banter since his days on Broadway. Ustinov and Ray could handle all sorts of comic situations, but they were relatively new to the game; the others had made their reputations in drama.

  The presence of Joan Bennett echoed an earlier experience in Humphrey’s career. Back in 1941, in The Maltese Falcon, he had acted opposite Mary Astor, who was still smarting from a highly publicized sex scandal involving the playwright George S. Kaufman. Excerpts from her diary were printed in the papers, and the divorce received additional coverage, all of it lascivious. Although Mary was the subject of whispering on the Maltese Falcon set, Humphrey took no part in it. Off-screen he continued to play the gentleman, never mentioning Astor’s steamy past. Now he was cast opposite Bennett, also the subject of a tabloid scandal. In 1951 her husband, producer Walter Wanger, had followed his wife and her agent, Jennings Lang, to a parking lot. Convinced they were having an affair, he shot Lang in the thigh and groin. From his hospital bed, Lang protested that the only relationship he and Bennett had was “strictly business.” Wanger’s lawyer invoked the insanity defense, insisting that the producer had been suffering from a nervous collapse due to severe financial setbacks. Bennett remained loyal during her husband’s four-month incarceration. She read a prepared statement to the press: “I never dreamed a marriage that has been as successful as ours for twelve years would ever be involved in so unhappy a situation. Knowing Hollywood as I do, knowing how good, wholesome, and sincere, by far and away a majority of motion picture people are, I want to express my deep regret that this incident will add to the erroneous opinion entertained by so many.”

  The speech seemed a dignified defense of her marriage at a painful time, but it was much more than that; she was fighting for her professional life—in vain, as things turned out. Bennet
t went on the studios’ moral blacklist and made only five movies in the decade that followed. She was to summarize her downfall in nine words: “I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.” One of those films was We’re No Angels. Her appearance was due to heavy lobbying by Humphrey on her behalf. The Wangers had no Pack status, but they were Holmby Hills neighbors; the Bogarts knew them socially, and Humphrey thought it unjust for a studio to punish Joan for Walter’s lunacy. He “made the stand,” the actress recalled gratefully, “to show what he thought of the underground movement to stamp out Joan Bennett.” The part was not large, and Paramount executives were feeling expansive that day. They allowed her to play a housewife whose home is invaded by three nefarious escapees from Devil’s Island.

  The trio—Joseph, Albert, and Jules (Bogart, Ray, and Ustinov)—call on the Ducotels (Carroll and Bennett), politely volunteering to fix their leaky roof—and incidentally seeking to hide from the police until a boat comes to take them to Paris. As they work, they make plans to slay the family of shopkeepers, pocketing everything they can lay their hands on. But eavesdropping reveals that the Ducotels are experiencing financial setbacks. Moreover, their daughter, Isabelle (Gloria Talbott), is having trouble with her faithless fiancé (John Baer) and his ruthless father (Rathbone). The convicts are touched by the situation. In a few arch lines they go from desperate to lovable—a setup known in show business as kitchy-koo with an anvil:

  JOSEPH: You guys act like you don’t want to cut their throats.

  JULES: Well, speaking for myself I’d just as soon not.

  ALBERT: After all, it might spoil their Christmas.

  JOSEPH: I don’t care how nice they are, they’re not going to soften me up. We’re escaping, and this is our only chance. We came here to rob them and that’s what we’re gonna do—beat their heads in, gouge their eyes out, cut their throats—as soon as we wash the dishes.