Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  CHAPTER 9

  Breathless

  i

  In the early 1950s the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried something old. Like many another venue for productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, the Brattle had become a film house in the early 1950s. But it was a film house unlike any other. It had a rear-screen projector, rather than the standard setup that beamed movies on a screen above the audience. And it had owners who believed that the past could be more alluring than the present. In 1953, for example, while neighboring movie theaters showed Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid and Walt Disney’s animated Peter Pan, the Brattle opened its season with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 thriller, The Lady Vanishes, and My Little Chickadee, a 1940 comedy starring W. C. Fields. On April 19, 1957, three months after the Bogart memorial, the theater ran the fifteen-year-old Casablanca.

  Final exams were coming up at neighboring Harvard, and students needed a break from the strain of cramming. Warners’ morality play in the desert, complete with Nazi villains, compromised refugees, and a love triangle, provided a perfect escape at an ideal time. Imbued with romantic agony, the undergraduates identified with Rick Blaine’s noble misery as he forsook Ilsa for the Greater Good. Again and again they returned to the Brattle, wearing trench coats and dangling cigarettes from their lower lips, singing “La Marseillaise,” shouting lines of dialogue on cue.

  The cult spread to campuses around the country. Other Bogart films joined Casablanca as college favorites. If Rick Blaine led the way, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Dix Steele, Fred C. Dobbs, and Billy Dannreuther were not far behind. Dannreuther, in fact, became something of a celebrity thanks to Truman Capote’s indefatigable self-promotion. The novelist enjoyed giving with one hand and taking with the other, but there was no ambiguity in his Bogart endorsement. After the star’s death he wrote a tribute, recalling the way he had divided the world into two kinds of people: professionals and bums. To Humphrey, “the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a ‘pro’ in his work. God knows he was.” With all the drinking and needling, Bogart understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, and because of that, “he lasted, he left his mark.”

  Another actor did not come off so well. “The Duke in His Domain” was a detailed and malicious portrait of Marlon Brando. Published in The New Yorker in November 1957, Truman’s hatchet job occasioned commentary on both coasts. Brando threatened to sue for defamation of character, and Capote became the subject of countless interviews. The judo expert rarely failed to mention Beat the Devil, a film that was reappraised, given a number of revivals, and started on its way from loser to camp classic.

  Capote’s praise of Humphrey whetted the public appetite for more encomiums. They were not long in coming. Although her name was linked to Frank Sinatra’s during the last months of Humphrey’s life and for more than a year afterward, and although she married Jason Robards Jr. (the marriage lasted from 1961 to 1969), Lauren Bacall remained the keeper of the flame. Bogart was “the only man I have ever known who truly and completely belonged to himself,” she wrote. “His convictions about life, work and people were so strong they were unshakeable. Nothing—no one—could make him lower his standards, lessen his character.” He possessed “the greatest gifts a man could have: respect for himself, for his craft,” and “integrity about life as well as work.”

  Actors who had worked with Humphrey spoke out. Rod Steiger likened him to “the master sergeant who had brought the platoon through the jungle. You respected the wars he had been through, and his ability to survive. He was a gentleman, an artistic soldier.”

  David Niven remembered his friend as “quite alarming to meet, for the first time, with his sardonic humor and his snarl that passes for a smile. It took me a little while to realize that he had perfected an elaborate camouflage to cover up one of the kindest and most generous of hearts.” Niven’s was a story told over and over again, a portrait of a man who hated to let the world know of his sensitivities and charitable impulses. As they all noted, he would often turn his back on a down-at-heels actor in public, then quietly send him a generous check.

  Two ladies spoke of Humphrey as much more than a sexual presence; to them he was what the old-time producers called a mensch, literally Yiddish for “man,” but signifying much more than that—an individual who always comes through, whose actions are as reliable as his words. Katharine Hepburn recalled Humphrey as “one of the biggest guys I ever met. He walked straight down the center of the road. No maybes. Yes or no. He liked to drink. He drank. He liked to sail a boat. He sailed a boat. He was an actor. He was happy and proud to be an actor.” And lauding her co-star in Maltese Falcon and Across the Pacific, Mary Astor wrote: “There he is, right there on the screen, saying what everyone is trying to say today, saying it loud and clear. ‘I hate hypocrisy. I don’t believe in words or labels or much of anything else. I’m not a hero. I’m a human being. I’m not very pretty. Like me or don’t like me!’ ”

  Joseph Mankiewicz was more intellectual. A great reader (as was Humphrey), he offered a literary speculation: Bogart’s attitude reflected “a sadness about the human condition. He had a kind of eighteenth-century, Alexander Pope nature. I think he would have made a superb Gatsby. His life reflected Gatsby’s sense of being an outsider.”

  The journalists and writers joined in. Gossip columnist Earl Wilson offered an admiring description in The Show Business Nobody Knows. Humphrey “lived the year around in a world of make-believe, false faces, and toupees, but he remained a realist who could stare you down and say, ‘Now let’s cut the crap and have a drink.’ ”

  Humphrey, as most of his friends acknowledged, was two Bogarts, the rough-hewn knight of the cinema, and the real-life aristocrat who came on like a tough guy. Max Lerner, Wilson’s New York Post colleague, appreciated Humphrey’s act, “mainly because most of us, in our actual lives, have so little chance to thumb our noses and consign the fakes, the stuffed men and the hollow men to hell.”

  Alistair Cooke described Humphrey as a character who might have come from a Graham Greene novel—a disappointed saint and a sanctified sinner. The Bogart he knew was “a much more intelligent man than most of his trade, or several others, a touchy man who found the world more corrupt than he hoped: a man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. He transmuted his own character into a film persona and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously good.”

  And Beat Generation novelist John Clellon Holmes (The Horn) observed that Humphrey Bogart is “not merely Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon or Rick in Casablanca. Sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, he is always suspicious of sentiment, verbosity, and cheap idealism. He was Bogey to us; we knew his style and attitudes as well as we knew our own; and he taught us something about the world we would inherit that was no less contagious than what Hemingway taught us.” Still, that style and those attitudes could hardly be expected to outlast the decade. After all, every other Hollywood celebrity had been subject to the whims of time and fashion. As it turned out, though, Bogart was immune.

  ii

  On December 10, 1957, forty-four-year-old Albert Camus accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his biography of the French-Algerian author, Herbert Lottman comments, “Albert Camus was seen as a moral guide for the postwar period. He was also a very likeable hero, looking even younger than his years, dapper in his Humphrey Bogart trench coat (looking very much a Bogart clone, and enjoying the notion when told so).” Having personified Ernest Hemingway’s solitary figure (“A man alone ain’t got no bloody f—ing chance”) and Raymond Chandler’s contemporary knight-errant (“Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid”), the Humphrey Bogart character was now seen as an example of the tough-minded existentialist as Camus had defined him (“vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty …”).


  This was only the start of an appreciation that developed into idolatry. Only a few weeks after the Bogart obituary had been printed in L’Express and Paris Soir, France’s predominant film theorist, André Bazin, weighed in with an essay, “The Death of Humphrey Bogart,” in Cahiers du Cinéma. We must not confuse Bogart’s acting style, he wrote, with the one “made fashionable by Marlon Brando prior to James Dean.” The behavior of those actors was “intended to be unforeseeable.” Bogart was foreseeable. That was his strength. He would always be a man who exhaled “distrust and weariness, wisdom and scepticism: Bogie is a stoic.” In a corrupt world he kept his own code of honor, without the consolations of religion or social approval. In the end, the kind of man Bogart portrayed over and over again “is not defined by his accidental respect, or his contempt, for bourgeois virtues, by his courage or his cowardice, but above all by this existential maturity which gradually transforms life into a stubborn irony at the expense of death.”

  The emerging generation of French actors and directors had always been attracted to American B movies, but did not always go public with their approval. After many of those features were dubbed films noir, and after Bazin gave Humphrey his imprimatur, the homages began in earnest. In 1960, Jean-Luc Godard, another contributor to Cahiers, went from theorist to director. His debut, Breathless, initiated the nouvelle vague, the new wave of French cinema, by using jump cuts, handheld camera work, and iris in-and-out shots—and by starring the twenty-six-year-old unprepossessing yet strangely attractive Jean-Paul Belmondo. He played Michel, a car thief whose gestures mimic the Bogart style from the incessant cigarette to the classic facial tics. Should anyone in the audience miss the allusions, Michel stares reverentially at a poster of The Harder They Fall and murmurs “Bogie” before starting out on a doomed criminal enterprise with the American expatriate Patricia (Jean Seberg), Godard’s version of Bacall.

  On the heels of Breathless came a film by Godard’s younger colleague François Truffaut. “What Bogart did, he did better than anyone else,” wrote Humphrey’s admirer. “He was more threatening than anyone else, and he struck his blows better. When he sweated, you could have wrung out his shirts.” Humphrey was obviously the man Truffaut had in mind when he created Charlie Kohler, the central character of Shoot the Piano Player. Charlie is played by Charles Aznavour, an unprepossessing/attractive singer known as the Sinatra of France. As the plot develops, the pianist’s real name is revealed as Edouard Saroyan. The reason he’s so good at the keyboard is that he was once a serious classical performer. He abandoned that career after the suicide of his wife. To disguise his pain, Charlie affects a tough, chain-smoking, trench-coated façade even when dealing with hardened criminals, an M.O. that leads to his downfall. In a consideration of Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player, critic Pauline Kael saw that both films were “haunted by the shade of Bogart.” Many more nouvelle vague movies would be obsessed by that shade. When those films unreeled at art houses in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, they granted Humphrey a renewed significance.

  In 1964 Time sent a reporter to the Brattle, where the Bogart festival was now a hallowed tradition. A Blue Parrot room, named for Sydney Greenstreet’s café in Casablanca, had been set up in the theater. Nearby a jukebox kept playing “As Time Goes By.” “When Bogart lights a cigarette on the screen,” the article stated, “girls respond with big, sexy sighs.” Asked about the object of their affection, a Radcliffe student lamented the Age of Analysis: “Bogie is everything we wish Harvard men were,” she said. “Bogie’s direct and honest. He gets involved with his women but he doesn’t go through an identity crisis every five minutes.” Her friend observed that there was “something just so heroic about going to see something anti-intellectual the night before an exam. Like imitating Bogart’s I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude.” Humphrey was, in brief, “the essence of cool.”

  That word deserves elaboration. “Cool” departed from its customary definition—a temperature closer to cold than to warm—in the 1930s. The new meaning came from African American sources and delineated a style, first in music and then in life itself. Cool jazz departed from the angular tempos and difficult harmonies of bebop. The long notes of Lester Young; the elegant solos of trumpeter Miles Davis (who titled one album The Birth of the Cool); the arrangements of Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, which stayed “inside” the melody—all featured a pure tone and an unemotional approach. In time “cool” turned into a description of all those who separated themselves from the herd, aloof, proud, unwilling to accede to the demands of fashion and status. The co-eds of a rising generation, turned off by self-absorbed Ivy Leaguers, saw the man in the trench coat as their beau ideal: mature, elusive—cool. Their male counterparts saw what was going on. They started to wear clothes in the Bogart mode; after that it was only a short step to copying his manner. Where others gushed, Vincent Sherman, who had directed Humphrey in Crime School and All Through the Night, held a wry view of the Bogart cult. “You know something? If Bogie knew that he had become a god, you know, for the modern generation of young people, he would have said, ‘Oh, cut the crap.’ ”

  Or would he? For all his scoffing at Tinseltown and Celluloid City, for all the put-downs of old-time producers and the rising generation of actors, Humphrey was quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—proud of his trade, of what he had accomplished in it, of his ability to catch a part of American life and put it into his pictures. In an unguarded moment, he gave a terse and accurate self-appraisal: “I’m a professional. I’ve done pretty well, don’t you think? I’ve survived in a pretty rough business.” Chances are he would have been pleased to be the essence of cool.

  iii

  In the mid- to late 1960s Humphrey Bogart films receded from dormitory chat. Undergraduates had more pressing matters to discuss. For more than a year they were in shock following the assassination of the young president, John F. Kennedy. That heartbreaking catastrophe seemed to use up all the oxygen in the room. They recovered their balance when Lyndon Johnson, stepping in for the fallen leader, excited them with his endorsement of the Voting Rights Act, a culmination of the civil rights movement. But only a few years later he infuriated them by stepping up the Vietnam War, subjecting them to the draft. That conflagration, coupled with the tragedy of three voter-registration workers murdered in Mississippi, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Bobby Kennedy, pushed all thoughts of entertainment aside.

  It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the drug-and-bike escapades of Easy Rider grabbed the attention of young moviegoers, along with the crime melodrama of Bonnie and Clyde and the adolescent hysteria of The Graduate. The “beach-blanket” films produced by a new studio, American International, played into the youthquake that made an icon of Elvis Presley, established rock ’n’ roll as the expression of the age, and quite literally changed the face of American cinema. New stars arose: Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman. Unfamiliar directors also made their marks in this period, among them Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, and Woody Allen. Humphrey Bogart had been reduced to a verb by the time the 1960s got going. To “bogart” was to hold on to a joint of marijuana with all four fingers and a thumb, the way Humphrey often held a cigarette—but without passing it on to others. There was even a song on the Easy Rider sound track called “Don’t Bogart Me.” It seemed likely that Humphrey would be remembered (if at all) as an antique personality, someone from a bygone era, like Wallace Reidl or Richard Dix. Ironically, it was Allen who turned things around, bringing his generation back to Humphrey with Play It Again, Sam.

  Allen’s wistful comedy opened on Broadway in February 1969 and played for 453 performances. It became a film in 1972, with virtually the same cast—Allen as Allan Felix, a neurotic, recently divorced film critic; Tony Roberts and Diane Keaton as Dick and Linda Christie, Allan’s best friends; and most notably, Jerry Lacy as the ghost of Humphrey Bogart. The film opens with the finale of Casablanca, when Rick Bla
ine nobly gives his letters of transit to Ilsa, the love of his life, and her heroic husband, Victor Laszlo. Allan gazes in wonder at his ideal, a man who never has any trouble with the opposite sex. Allan is the diametrical opposite; his liaisons are always cringe-making and usually end after one catastrophic date. After one wrenching episode, Humphrey’s shade appears in his classic trench coat, puffing his omnipresent cigarette. “Forget all this fancy relationship stuff,” he advises in Humphrey’s wise, sibilant tone. “The world is full of dames. All you got to do is whistle.”

  The shade proceeds to teach Allan a few things about women and how to handle them.

  HUMPHREY: Move closer to her.

  ALLAN: How close?