Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  Recovery was excruciating. At one point Humphrey coughed his stitches loose and they had to be resewed; he had no appetite, and he was in constant pain, alleviated by telegrams, flowers, and visits from friends. John Huston showed up, full of his patented bonhomie and assurance. “He’ll be fine, just fine,” he told Lauren. Bogie would be ideal for a film he had in mind, an adaptation of a Kipling novel. “We’ll make The Man Who Would Be King yet.” Fred Astaire and John Wayne, stars he scarcely knew, phoned in. The superagent Irving Lazar, who was terrified of illness, came by. A perennial opponent sent a wire: DEAR BOGIE, KNOW YOU WILL BE YOUR GOOD SELF IN THE VERY NEAR FUTURE. MY THOUGHTS ARE WITH YOU FOR A SPEEDY RECOVERY. REGARDS, JACK WARNER. For all of Jack’s solicitude, however, he was strictly business. The Warners film that was to have reunited Humphrey and Lauren, Melville Goodwin, was coldly retitled Top Secret Affair and recast with Kirk Douglas in the lead role and Susan Hayward as his love interest.

  Precisely the opposite occurred at Columbia. Harry Cohn was the most detested of the old Hollywood moguls. (Indeed, when he died the following year a crowd of some two thousand went to the cemetery, prompting one of the attendees to murmur, “Give the people what they want and they will go out for it.”) Yet Harry was extremely fond of Humphrey and Humphrey of him, possibly because Humphrey liked to play thugs, and Harry was the real thing. In a rare benign gesture Cohn kept The Good Shepherd on Columbia’s production schedule and saw to it that press releases regularly went out, announcing that the C. S. Forester sea story would be Bogart’s next picture. Humphrey told one of his pals he would beat cancer because Cohn kept calling him about getting back in harness, and “you know that tough old bastard wouldn’t call if he thought I wasn’t going to make it.”

  Surgery was only the first part of Humphrey’s ordeal. He had to undergo X-ray treatments that left him nauseated and chemotherapy that weakened his constitution. “When a man is sick,” recalled Dr. Brandsma, “you get to know him. You find out whether he’s made of soft wood or hard wood. I began to get fonder of Bogie with each visit. He was made of very hard wood indeed.” Humphrey convinced himself that the treatments were working, and in that optimistic spirit he started smoking again, this time filtered Chesterfields. Save for the time spent in the hospital, his liquor consumption never stopped.

  In the previous two years Humphrey had made eight films. Now he was at home every day, all day, and the rumor mills began to grind overtime. Friends brought Humphrey the news he didn’t hear on the radio or read in the columns. It was all bad: he was dying, the countdown had begun, a burial plot had been picked out. Dorothy Kilgallen, the Hearst columnist who thrived on distress, real or imagined, wrote that Humphrey Bogart had been moved to the eighth floor of Memorial Hospital, where he was fighting for his life. There was no Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, and Humphrey leapt on her misinformation. He got hold of the editor of the New York Journal-American, Kilgallen’s home paper, and shouted into the phone, “Do I sound as if I’m fighting for my life? God damn it, don’t you check your stories? You just allow that bitch to print anything.” He hung up exhausted but vindicated. A retraction followed.

  After years of playing character leads, Humphrey had reverted to the part he knew best—the Raymond Chandler male “who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Chandler elaborated on this in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” Such a figure “must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.” Humphrey filled that description as if it had been written with him in mind. Joe Hyams suggested an official tongue-in-cheek denial—something on the order of “I’m down to my last martini” or “I’m fighting to keep my head above the press.” But Humphrey wanted to write his own material this time, and he came up with a three-hundred-word open letter to the press. It not only displayed a rude wit, but a lively sense of the grotesque and a profound disgust for sham.

  “I have read,” the statement began, “that both lungs have been removed; that I couldn’t live another half-hour; that I was fighting for my life in a hospital which doesn’t exist out here; that my heart has stopped and been replaced by an old gasoline pump from a defunct Standard Oil station.” He was just getting warmed up. “I have been on the way to practically every cemetery you can name from here to the Mississippi—including several where I am certain they only accept dogs.” The indisposition was explained in layman’s terms. “I had a slight malignancy in my esophagus. So that some of you won’t have to go into the research department, it’s the pipe that runs from your throat to your stomach. The operation for the removal of the malignancy was successful, although it was touch and go for a while whether the malignancy or I would survive.”

  In conclusion, all he needed was “thirty pounds in weight which I am sure some of you can spare. Possibly we could start something like a Weight Bank for Bogart and believe me I’m not particular which part of your anatomy it comes from.

  “In conclusion, any time you want to run a little medical bulletin on me, just pick up the phone and, as they say in the Old Country—I’m in the book.”

  viii

  Decades later, oncologist Albert B. Lowenfels examined Humphrey Bogart’s medical records. Despite the fact that the patient was treated with all the therapeutic measures then available, wrote the doctor, his “operation must be considered palliative.” What he meant was that a cure was very unlikely—less than 4 percent of esophageal cancer patients survived for more than a year during the 1950s. The physicians at Good Samaritan had two objectives: (1) to excise the cancer tissue, in the knowledge that they were probably too late to get it all, and (2) to relieve suffering. Although their efforts were heroic, they failed on both counts.

  During the postoperative period Humphrey dropped in at Romanoff’s. Nicholas Ray, who had directed Knock on Any Door and In a Lonely Place, watched with grim wonder as his friend tried to choke down some food. “One could hear the Romanoff sanddab hit the bottom of Bogie’s stomach, so he softened the creature’s fall with a pool of scotch and beer, and settled a haze of Chesterfield smoke around it.” Occasionally Humphrey took the wheel of the Santana. In happier days, his boat was a haven, a place free from the stress of filmmaking and everyday life. Now it was a sad reminder of what used to be. One afternoon, Claire Trevor and her husband, producer Milton Bren, came aboard for a visit. She saw how emaciated he looked, and made the mistake of giving him a motherly pat on the arm. “Leave me alone and get off my boat,” he snapped. “I don’t want any sympathy.” Hyams remembered the incident. “When they left he said he was sorry he had spoken so harshly. After all, they were old friends. But dammit, he didn’t want any sympathy—theirs or anyone else’s. ‘Milton will understand,’ he said.”

  Two months later, in November 1956, Humphrey complained of acute soreness in his left shoulder. He and Lauren assumed that the hurt came from a pinched nerve; these were frequent after major surgery. That was not the case here. During Humphrey’s brief return to the hospital, doctors found that the malignancy had spread. Lauren was taken aside by one of the attending physicians and told what the families of cancer patients were usually told at such a time: Everything is being done. As long as the patient’s alive there’s a chance. Research is being conducted all the time—a cure could suddenly appear. After all, one day there was no penicillin, next day there was.

  Humphrey was allowed to go home. He moved slowly, agonizingly, and had no interest in food. His weight kept going down. Yet he remained alert to what was going on around him. The preceding year, Lauren had starred in Designing Woman opposite Gregory Peck. Written on the Wind, in which she co-starred with Rock Hudson, had just opened in New York theaters. The first was a romantic comedy about the fashion business, the second a soap opera about the lives and loves of an oil-rich brother and sister. Lauren was to remember her husband stretched out on a chaise reading the reviews, “and his saying, ‘I wo
uldn’t do too many of these.’ His standards were as high as ever.” He remained aware of his wife’s roving eye. She had been infatuated with Adlai Stevenson, and then with the conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein. With deliberate coolness he warned her, “Lenny has too many things to do in his life to be a satisfying mate. You’d probably have a great time for a weekend, but not for a lifetime.” There were rumors about a fling with Sinatra. Humphrey responded as Lauren thought he would: “I knew that Bogie—how ever much he loved me—would put up with flirtation,” she wrote in her memoir. “But if I ever really did anything, he would leave me. He valued character more than anything, and he trusted mine—I knew that and it kept me in check.”

  Because he shaved every morning with an electric razor, he saw what was happening to him; the eyes bright with pain, exceedingly large in the diminished face, the body growing leaner and weaker. One afternoon as Stephen and Leslie played in the bedroom, he appealed to Lauren, “Don’t have them in here too often, Baby.” The idea was to have the kids remember their father in better days, not as a drained and humiliated husk watching them from a chair.

  Ever the chess player, Humphrey moved into endgame as Christmas came around. His hairdresser, Verita Thompson, had remarried. She heard about her former lover’s indisposition and dropped by to pay her respects to a dying man. “He was losing weight so fast that I could hardly believe it,” she wrote sadly. “I died inside every time I put his toupee on him, he was so skeletal.” He needled her nonetheless, and then, in a sudden quixotic gesture, offered to leave her the Santana. She smiled, thanked him, and refused. John Huston stopped by with Morgan Maree, who had managed Humphrey’s money in the old days. In the course of their first drinks, Humphrey suddenly burst out, “Look, fellas, come clean. Am I going to make it? Tell me the truth.” With a booming voice of assurance, Maree said, “Of course you are, Bogie. We’re not kidding you.” Huston understood that he was lying, and approved. Lauren “didn’t want Bogie to read in the paper that he was going to die, so everyone who knew him put the best face on they could.”

  It was not good enough. Humphrey was, above all things, a realist. He made arrangements to take care of his sister Pat, who had been in and out of institutions for episodes of manic depression, and had his lawyer draw up a will leaving stipends to his secretary and his cook. The bulk of the estate would be divided between Lauren and their children, Stephen and Leslie, in the form of trust funds. That way, he told a friend, the money would be out of the reach of fortune hunters.

  Humphrey had been able to walk on his own until December. Dressed in slacks and a red smoking jacket, he managed to get himself downstairs every evening to receive the special friends Lauren invited for a drink, usually between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. But as the disease moved into the final stages, he was forced to make his way around in a wheelchair. He weighed a little more than eighty pounds. The dumbwaiter was turned into a makeshift elevator; a butler lifted him from the wheelchair onto a stool, and the contraption brought him up and down as desired. Fighting for breath, he took hits from two large green oxygen tanks, one upstairs and one downstairs—yet another indignity to be borne, along with the injections of nitrogen mustard to delay the progress of the malignant cells, along with the crescent-shaped receptacle for his sputum, along with the frequent vomiting of blood. Lauren refused to accept the inevitable until three of Humphrey’s physicians came to the house and asked for a private audience. Dr. Brandsma spoke for them. “I’m sure you’d rather know the truth, wouldn’t you? I’m sure you know already Bogie cannot last much longer. We don’t know how he’s lasted this long.” She begged them for some sign that he might still recover. They shook their heads. It was just a matter of weeks, perhaps days.

  The best Lauren could do was make her husband comfortable, confine visits of friends to a precious few, and pre-order the funeral arrangements. Clifton Webb paid a call and when he left the bedroom collapsed in moans and tears. Lauren begged him to be quiet so Humphrey wouldn’t hear his cries of distress. Sam Goldwyn and William Wyler came to the bedroom. Jack Warner followed. He attempted to tell an amusing story and choked up. Afterward, Humphrey remarked to Lauren, “Jack’s not a bad guy—he’s just so uncomfortable with everyone. He has to make jokes to prove he’s regular.” The frequent visitors Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy came by on Saturday, January 12, 1957. When they left, Spencer said, “Good night, Bogie.” Returned Humphrey, “Good-bye, Spence.” They knew what he meant. The odor of death was all around the room in the last days; no fumigant could disguise it. Dr. Brandsma did what he could to prepare the children. He took Stephen aside and informed him that his father was going to sleep soon, a sleep so deep that he wouldn’t wake up. The eight-year-old listened without expression and abruptly ran out of the room. Lauren phoned Spencer Tracy and asked him to write a eulogy to be read at the memorial service. Spencer begged off; he thought he would be too emotional to deliver anything coherent. Lauren understood. She called John Huston and asked him. The director grimly agreed to do it. The countdown began. The next morning Lauren was preparing to take the children to Sunday school when Humphrey called out weakly, “Good-bye, kid. Hurry back.” When she returned he was comatose. Later that day Stephen was taken in to see him. It was as the doctor predicted: his father was in a sleep from which he would not, could not, awaken. The boy kissed his father’s cheek and went to his own room. At 2:25 the following morning, a nurse awakened Lauren. The terrible ordeal was over. She dialed David Niven with the news: “My darling husband is gone.”

  ix

  Obituaries ran in the major newspapers of the world, from New York to Paris to Hong Kong to Melbourne to New Delhi and beyond, praising Humphrey Bogart as “a consummate actor,” “the essence of toughness,” “a hard-working professional,” “a star who thrived on Broadway and [in] Hollywood,” an actor who became “the perfect image of a man hunted by death,” and “a man storm-tossed by fate.”

  On the morning of January 17, friends gathered at the All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. More than two thousand fans stood outside, people who didn’t know the deceased personally, but who felt some connection with him through the image he had so forcefully projected in more than seventy films. As they did, a cremation was taking place twenty miles away. The ashes would be put in an urn holding the tiny gold whistle Humphrey Bogart had given to Lauren Bacall thirteen years before. Humphrey had always been uncomfortable at burial ceremonies. He left word that his remains were to be scattered over the waves of the Pacific Ocean. To do so would have been illegal at the time, and so, fitting though a saltwater tribute would have been, the family arranged for a permanent niche at Forest Lawn. Friends would grumble about that option; one of them remembered that Humphrey had called the sumptuous cemetery “Disneyland for stiffs.”

  The church held some two hundred and fifty mourners. The group included drinking pals, sailing cronies, and the Hollywood elite. The sailors were particularly pleased with the glass-enclosed model of Humphrey’s beloved Santana, a stand-in for the casket. A new generation of actors was knocking at the door, but the traditional leads had not yet lost their places. The male stars of the late 1940s were still big in the late 1950s, as evidenced by those in the pews. Charles Boyer attended, as did Gary Cooper, Louis Jourdan, Danny Kaye, James Mason, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Ronald Reagan, and Spencer Tracy. The veteran female stars included Marlene Dietrich, Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, and Katharine Hepburn. Richard Brooks was there, along with fellow directors Nunnally Johnson, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler. Nearby sat the moguls Harry Cohn, David O. Selznick, and Jack Warner. A great many reminiscences were exchanged; it was remembered that the school dropout had been a reverse fake—someone who pretended to be uneducated and common, but who, as his friends testified, could recite from memory whole swaths of Plato, Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Shakespeare. Nunnally Johnson smartly summarized the deceased: “Bogart thought of himself as Scaramouche, the mischievous scamp who sets off the fireworks, then ni
ps out.” Joe Hyams, friend and biographer, had his own bemused take: “It seems likely that in death Bogart has come close to his own rigorous test of fame. ‘You’re not a star,’ he once said, ‘until they can spell your name in Karachi.’ ”

  The ceremony was appropriately spare and ecumenical. The Reverend Kermit Castellanos read the Twenty-third Psalm (“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil”), as well as Tennyson’s poem of setting out to sea as a metaphor for death, “Crossing the Bar” (“Twilight and evening bell / And after that the dark! / And may there be no sadness of farewell, / When I embark …”). Music by Humphrey’s favorite composers, Bach and Debussy, filled the air.

  John Huston came forward to deliver his eulogy. The tall man spoke in a distinctive papery baritone: “Himself, he never took too seriously—his work most seriously. He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with amused cynicism. Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect.…” Huston went on to describe the fountains of Versailles, where a sharp-Soothed pike keeps the carp active so that they never get complacent and fat. “Bogie,” he said with a wicked smile, “took rare delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood.” He concluded, “He was endowed with the greatest gift a man can have: talent. The whole world came to recognize it.… We have no reason to feel sorry for him—only for ourselves for having lost him. He is quite irreplaceable.” It was a poignant and effective envoi. The director of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen expressed what everyone knew—the departed was indeed sui generis, the most perversely attractive actor in the history of cinema. Yet even Huston underestimated the enduring image of the man. For as the wet-eyed mourners went up the aisles and out into the Southern California sunshine, it was not the beginning of the end of Humphrey Bogart’s reputation. It was the end of the beginning.