For reasons known only to him, Curtiz abandoned his usually deft touch in favor of an elephantine coyness. Saints in the guise of sinners, the escapees induce their poisonous pet snake, Adolphe, to bite Isabelle’s intended and his father. Not satisfied with murder, they find an acceptable young man for the jeune fille en fleur before voluntarily returning to Devil’s Island. At the fadeout halos appear over their heads—and over the cage holding Adolphe. It was too much for reviewers. The New York Times called We’re No Angels “a shrill, misguided picture that should have been a honey.” Time said the “over-whimsical” film suffered because of Curtiz’s inability “to decide whether he is reading from a fairy tale or a police blotter. Bogart plays his role pretty straight; Aldo Ray is disconcertingly elfin for an alleged sex fiend; and Ustinov’s mugging seems overdone.” Nearly every paper remarked on the inappropriate choice of the screen-expanding VistaVision for an intimate family picture. It was true, as some acknowledged, that the male lead had a chance to parody his tough guy roles of the past, but this was old news; Humphrey had done that in All Through the Night, released in 1942. In those palmy days, though, he was on the rise, waiting for The Maltese Falcon to vault him to the top of the marquees. There were no such prospects now. All that mattered from here on was the job. Forget the salary and the celebrity that might—or might not—go with it. In this town nothing had really changed. If you were working and you knew your lines, you were a professional. If you were loafing, you were a bum.
v
In March 1955, the Academy Awards were dispensed at the RKO Pantages Theater. Humphrey was nominated for his performance as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. The last time he and Marlon Brando had been up against each other was 1951. Marlon was nominated for A Streetcar Named Desire, Humphrey for The African Queen. This time matters were reversed. Marlon earned his first Oscar for On the Waterfront, which received eight nominations overall. Yet Humphrey’s influence could be felt throughout the evening. Edmund O’Brien won Best Supporting Actor for his work in The Barefoot Contessa; Billy Wilder was nominated for Best Director, Hal Pereira and Walter Tyler for Art Direction, and Sam Comer and Ray Moyer for Set Direction for Sabrina; Stanley Roberts for Best Screenplay and Max Steiner for Best Score for The Caine Mutiny—all of them Bogart films.
Two months later Humphrey did something strange: he appeared in a television drama. He had never liked the medium; it tended to chew up actors and spit them out. Maybe it was OK for young performers beginning their careers, but the TV studio’s unforgiving lights were not for a man of advancing years. “I look awful on television,” he told a reporter. “Every pore on my face can be seen on those home screens. And you can imagine what I look like on sets with bad reception.” But NBC’s high-toned Producers’ Showcase lured Humphrey with an irresistible offer: if he said yes, Lauren would play the female lead. Except for radio shows, the Bogarts hadn’t performed together in ten years. Added to this was the allure of the role: he’d be reprising Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. Humphrey needed some luck right about now, and surely the play that put him on the map in 1935 would bring him good fortune in 1955. And so, on Memorial Day, Humphrey and Lauren appeared in a ninety-minute adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson opus. Broadcast in prime time, the teleplay co-starred Henry Fonda as Alan Squier. Lauren played the innocent Gabriella. The Desperate Hours had featured Humphrey as a kind of Duke Mantee in middle age; he had no trouble doing a variation for Showcase. Fonda registered well as the faded intellectual. Lauren, however, was too urbane and throaty for the part that helped launch Bette Davis. It was difficult to believe her as an unsophisticated child of the desert. Delbert Mann, who would win an Oscar for his direction of Marty, cleverly deemphasized the male roles and shielded Lauren with flattering close-ups. The protection came at a price. Petrified Forest was a dated work that needed all the help it could get. For maximum effect Duke had to be a continual presence, a representative of inexorable fate affecting everyone he came across. Instead, Mann kept him out of sight for significant portions of the program. When Duke did have a big scene, the little screen undid him. He came across as tired and possibly ill, the face seamed by more than a life of crime. Television critics, most of them new to the job, pointed out the program’s deficiencies but regarded them as secondary; what counted was the singular Bogart style. The Times praised Humphrey’s performance as “cold, vicious and convincingly peremptory.” Few actors could “suggest so much evil so quietly.” Variety said that Producers’ Showcase was exactly that, offering Bogart “at his best, a tough gunman capable of murder, snarling delight at the way his captives must obey his orders, and animal-instinctive in the ways of self-preservation.”
After this television debut, Humphrey received a cluster of offers. Would he like to do another play on TV? How about a weekly adventure series on film? Neither choice met with his approval. To the former option, he said, “Suppose I had laryngitis, suppose I just wasn’t feeling up to par. I turn in a bad performance and the critics rap me. I just don’t like the idea of a one-shot.” A regular series had even less appeal: “I’d sooner dig ditches.” On a visit to Hollywood, Helen Hayes suggested a return to his original venues. According to A. M. Sperber, who interviewed Hayes three years before her death, Humphrey wasn’t even willing to do a play in Los Angeles, much less on Broadway. “You know what would happen?” he asked the first lady of the American theater. He didn’t wait for her reply. “These bastards would all go out in the lobby and say, ‘So that’s what’s come to us as a big, big star—a big important actor.… That’s what’s been posing as a great big performer?’ No, I couldn’t do that.”
It was feature films or nothing. In 1956 Humphrey announced the formation of Mapleton Pictures, whose products would be distributed by Allied Artists. The new company planned to buy hot properties, providing its CEO with roles that would otherwise go to younger stars. He needed those parts. Money and status had been his for a long time, but they were not enough to assuage an almost pathological desire to work, to go somewhere in the morning, to learn lines, to play a character whose name was not Humphrey Bogart.
Mapleton’s first movie would be based on a crime series, Underworld U.S.A., then being serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Humphrey and Lauren planned to be reunited on the big screen for that one, as well as for the adaptation of Melville Goodwin, U.S.A., John P. Marquand’s novel about an army general and the baroness of a newspaper syndicate. Before those could get under way, he was contract-bound to appear in an adaptation of The Harder They Fall, a novel Budd Schulberg called his “black valentine to the sweet science of boxing.” The film would be distributed by Columbia. Jerry Wald, who had been involved with six Bogart films at Warners, was set to produce; Rod Steiger and Nehemiah Persoff were given big parts. Those names set off alarms. In Humphrey’s lexicon, Actors Studio graduates were defined as slackers with bad wardrobes. He suddenly chose to forget that he had set the pattern of sartorial impudence long before they arrived on the scene. (David Niven once asked his sailing companion how he could keep such a tight ship and such a neat home and then show up for a formal dinner unshaven, wearing an unpressed tweed sport coat. “The point I’m making,” Humphrey told him, “is that if I choose to show up unshaven and stinking, it’s nobody’s business but mine, and nobody gets hurt but me.” Marlon Brando could not have been more succinct.)
Now Humphrey would be face-to-face with an uncomfortable confluence of talents. Schulberg had written On the Waterfront, which had totally eclipsed The Caine Mutiny at the Oscars. In Waterfront, Steiger had played Brando’s brother, and Nehemiah Persoff a beetle-browed cutthroat. They would be the only actors ever to work with both Marlon and Humphrey. The idea of sharing the screen with those two gave Humphrey many a bad night; he made no secret of his contempt for members of the “scratch your ass and mumble” school. But he was a professional, not a bum, and resolved to see it through.
The “dailies”—the takes that were run at the completion of each day’s f
ilming—showed Humphrey looking tired and ill-used. Few bothered to comment on his appearance; boxing pictures were always about down-and-dirty types, sellouts who surround pugs on their way up and on their way down. Here, Eddie Willis is a disillusioned journalist weary of being underpaid for telling the truth. He’s ripe for the plucking, and boxing promoter Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) makes him an offer he can’t refuse. For 10 percent of the gate, Eddie will hype Toro Moreno (Mike Lane), an obscure Argentinian heavyweight. Once Eddie succumbs to his blandishments, Nick guides “the Giant from the Andes” through a series of fixed fights. All along, Eddie serves as Toro’s enabler, convincing the press, and the naïve Giant himself, that the overgrown boy is a legitimate contender. In one bout Toro manages to kill his opponent—a man so damaged by previous adversaries that one vigorous jab is enough to finish him. Eddie knows his client actually has “a powder puff punch and a glass jaw,” but he goes along and gets along until the big man is ranked Challenger Number One. At the championship bout, Nick and his cohort place their bets against Toro, watch the carnage from the front row, and take home the big money.
From the opening moments of the film, self-revulsion shows on Eddie’s face and in his body language. But his conscience has been chloroformed, and all along he makes no attempt to right the wrongs he has abetted. Near the end, though, when the scarred and bruised Toro can barely speak through his broken jaw, the journalist does awaken to what has been done to him, and to the ruined boxer. Eddie takes his own dishonest earnings, fills the fighter’s ham hands with dollars, and sends him home to South America. This is only the beginning of the Willis redemption. With the encouragement of his forbearing wife, Beth (Jan Sterling), he inserts a sheet of paper in his typewriter and begins a book that will tell the truth about professional boxing and the racketeers who run it.
The Harder They Fall was obviously based on the career of Primo Carnera, a circus strongman from Italy who fought in the 1920s and 1930s, between the heydays of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis. At the time the heavyweight division was controlled by mobsters Frankie Carbo and Blinkie Palermo, who brought “the Ambling Alp” along through a series of questionable fights. Primo finally fought an honest one against champion Max Baer, who knocked him down eleven times in eleven rounds. Not long afterward, Carnera learned that his manager had stolen most of his money.
The film gained its punch from that sorry history—and from the presence of retired fighters with welted faces, among them Jersey Joe Walcott and Baer himself. Persoff, as Benko’s corrupt bookkeeper, and Harold Stone, as an honest sportswriter, were vital assets. But it was Lane’s pathos, Steiger ’s snarling intensity, and Humphrey’s tattered antihero that put the story across with the force of a blow to the solar plexus. Humphrey needled Steiger throughout; still, they enjoyed each other, and the younger man got a particular kick out of watching the older one when he got going. At one point in the filming Humphrey read a news story about Darryl F. Zanuck. The producer was advocating a search for new acting talent, unfamiliar faces, and names who would be tomorrow’s superstars. That was all Humphrey needed. In his view there was nothing wrong with Hollywood’s established actors: “What they want are new Bogarts, Coopers, Gables and Stewarts—at seventy-five dollars a week!”
To put Zanuck in his place, and anyone else who was thinking along those lines, he ran an ad in Variety satirizing the Tabs and Rocks and Tonys and other male starlets. A photo showed “Nails” Bogart in a sweatshirt standing with “Spike” Baer in a suit with bow tie and “Tack” Walcott in slacks, sweater, and leather fedora. The headline read THE OLDEST ESTABLISHED PERMANENT NEW FACES NOW AVAILABLE. Aline Mosby, a reporter for United Press International, sought Humphrey out for an interview, and found him getting his hair trimmed. While the barber snipped, he gave her enough quotes to get the town talking. “New faces,” he snarled. “Why don’t they lift the old faces? The studios are full of hot air. Every couple of years the studio heads say this. If they’re going to make new stars, why haven’t they made them by now?” Later he elaborated on the theme. Many of these young men had been picked up for screen tests from street corners and filling stations. “Shout ‘Gas!’ around the studios today, and half the young male stars will come running.”
Of course Humphrey knew that exaggeration is the royal road to attention. But at the root of his arguments was the very real fear of disregard. He had seen it happen too often: the hard climb up, the few years of disproportionate rewards, and then the slide to obscurity. Everyone in Hollywood knew the joke about the three stages of fame: (1) Get me John Gilbert. (2) Get me a John Gilbert type. (3) Who is John Gilbert? Would they be saying the same of Humphrey Bogart someday?
The dailies didn’t give Humphrey any reason to cheer. There was nothing wrong with his acting—he still had the same authority and gritty masculinity. But the image was dispiriting. He looked even wearier and more afflicted then he did on television. His eyes were watery and his toupee wouldn’t fool a blind man. He thought the critics would kill the film. They didn’t. Reviews for The Harder They Fall were generally approbatory, and sometimes more than that. By that time, however, Humphrey had little interest in the box office receipts, the critical assessments, or the next assignment. He was about to get involved in a much larger battle, and the odds were stacked against him.
vi
While lunching at Romanoff’s, Humphrey happened to run into another Oscar winner, Greer Garson. In the middle of their conversation he doubled over with a coughing fit. Alarmed, Garson insisted that he consult her doctor, Dr. Maynard Brandsma, an internist at the Beverly Hills Clinic. Humphrey tried to put off the appointment, she kept pushing, and he gave in. “I should have realized at once,” Lauren was to write, “that the mere fact that he’d consented to go was an indication of something serious.”
It was very serious. Doctor Brandsma did a bronchoscopy, reaching down into Humphrey’s esophagus, and the results showed some disturbing results. “It still didn’t seem ominous to us,” Lauren wrote, more like “an infection of some kind.” Because Humphrey found it painful to swallow, his weight, never more than 170 pounds, had dropped to 155. Frank Sinatra offered the Bogarts the use of his house in Palm Springs and they went on a brief vacation, assuming the “infection” would heal under the sun. It did not. When they returned Humphrey visited the clinic for more tests. They showed the presence of malignant cells. An operation was mandatory and ought to be done at once. Humphrey appealed to Dr. Brandsma: There was a movie he and Lauren wanted to make. How about postponing the op until they finished Underworld U.S.A.? Responded the doctor, “Not unless you want a lot of flowers at Forest Lawn.” He saw his patient wavering, and went on: “We were lucky to catch it so early—it’s not often that we can in that area.”
So that was it. Humphrey told a friend, “I was never sick a day in my life, and now I have the feeling I’ll be in intensive care from now on.” Another friend, British journalist Alistair Cooke, once wrote of the renegade Rick Blaine in Casablanca: “More than any other character he was to play, this one fitted Bogart’s own like a glove.” Cooke was wrong. The postoperative Humphrey had lost his distinctive diction and his unique compact energy. He could still be a husband, father, and friend. But his acting career was done. From here on, only one role was open to him: a cancer patient hiding his pain in order to put his friends and family at ease. That, as it turned out, was the hand-in-glove part, the one that most closely befit his temperament and moral stance.
vii
The irony was that outside the hospital the world was enjoying a false spring. Polls said President Dwight Eisenhower would be a shoo-in for reelection. He had done what he had promised to do: end the war in Korea. His secretary of defense, Charles Wilson, had become notorious for a statement uttered during a Senate hearing. Asked whether he could make a decision contrary to the interests of the company he once headed, Wilson replied that he could do so in the abstract, but couldn’t imagine such an occasion “because for years I thought what was g
ood for General Motors is good for the country.” The quote inspired Al Capp, the author and illustrator of “Li’l Abner,” to create the plutocratic General Bullmoose, who spouted such aphorisms as “Don’t do anything crooked unless it’s legal.” Yet Wilson had slashed the military budget, and shortly afterward the economy began to boom. During this good time Dr. Jonas Salk developed a vaccine that proved effective at immunizing children against polio. In the USSR the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was about to list, in some detail, the mass murders and other crimes of Joseph Stalin, thereby creating at least a temporary thaw in the Cold War.
Battered by an expanding television schedule and shrinking profits, the film industry still refused to think small. Giant was not only the name of a Warner Bros. epic starring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor; it also addressed the way movies were heading. Paramount would distribute Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of The Ten Commandments and King Vidor’s version of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Twentieth Century Fox presented The King and I, one of the biggest musicals ever produced. Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days, shown in a wide-screen process called Todd-AO, had more than forty cameo roles; the actors filling them included George Raft, Peter Lorre, Frank Sinatra, and Edward R. Murrow, all of whom had touched Humphrey’s life one way or another. The major studios had heard the bell tolling for years, but they were still active. None of them were going quietly into that good night.
Humphrey watched it all from the sidelines, wishing vainly that he could be a part of the action. Sadly, he and Lauren took the children aside. She remembered telling them that “Daddy had to have something removed from his throat—it wasn’t serious but he’d be away for a couple of weeks. Steve naturally didn’t understand. Leslie, being three and a half, certainly didn’t. How could they when even we didn’t?” The operation was the best money could buy at the time, but the time was not propitious for victims of esophageal malignancy. Methods of detection were inaccurate, and laser surgery lay more than ten years in the future. Two months after his fifty-seventh birthday, Humphrey checked into Good Samaritan Hospital in Beverly Hills. On March 1, 1956, a radical procedure began. It went on for nine hours. The esophagus was entirely removed, along with two lymph nodes and a rib. The vagus nerve, which controls digestion, was cut. Humphrey’s stomach was attached to his gullet; food would have a shorter way to travel, he would fill up rapidly—too rapidly—and would never really enjoy eating again. The scar from the operation was more than three feet long, running from shoulder to waist.
Tough Without a Gun Page 27
