Tough Without a Gun

by Stefan Kanfer

  HUMPHREY: The length of your lips.

  During the course of instruction, Allan and Linda find themselves falling in love. This is Allan’s most successful affair—indeed, his only successful affair. But the neurotic film buff is too burdened with guilt to carry on with his best friend’s wife. At the finale, with noble gravitas he gives her back to Dick, à la Casablanca.

  HUMPHREY: That was great. I guess you won’t be needing me anymore. There’s nothing I can tell you now that you don’t already know.

  ALLAN: You’re not too tall and kind of ugly, but I’m short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own.

  Before the ghost vanishes, he offers his famous salute:

  HUMPHREY: Here’s looking at you, kid.

  From Play It Again, Sam the Bogart mystique reentered popular culture with a new vigor. Suddenly Humphrey seemed to be everywhere. Bogart Slept Here, directed by Mike Nichols, never quite made it to Broadway. A small theater in Los Angeles presented another play, When Bogart Was. In it, two drifters in New York City fantasize about the actor on the set of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Gerald Duchovnay’s Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibliography mentions A Kiss Is Just a Kiss, an off-Broadway play dealing with Humphrey’s failed marriages to Helen Menken and Mayo Methot, as well as Bogart: The Good Bad Guy, a London revue that turned Ezra Goodman’s friendly memoir into a musical. In addition, Humphrey’s name was dropped in more than twenty songs, from Bertie Higgins’s “Key Largo” to Murray McLauchlin’s “What Would Bogie Do?”

  Bogart-themed bistros, taverns, and bars sprouted up all across the United States, and even in Mexico. Most were unimaginative recreations of the Casablanca set, replete with ceiling fans and waiters in rumpled white linen suits. But there were a few that played up Humphrey’s image, among them Bogart’s American Restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, Bogart’s Chophouse of Tinely Park, Illinois—and Pizza Humphrey Bogart in Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria.

  Thomasville Furniture unveiled its Bogart Collection in the late 1990s. According to the ad copy, Humphrey “believed that true class could not be imitated or taught.” You either had it or you didn’t, and Bogart had it in overplus. The collection presented close to a hundred pieces, including the Trench Coat Chair, the Santana Sofa, and the Contessa Banquette.

  On more than a dozen websites devoted to the memory of Humphrey Bogart, all sorts of merchandise is currently offered for sale. Fans and scholars can buy DVDs and videotapes of more than fifty Bogart movies, as well as a tape recording of Humphrey’s appearance on the The Jack Benny program, and audiotapes of old radio shows. There are T-shirts with likenesses of Humphrey and Lauren, as well as garments bearing some favorite (and sometimes inaccurate) Bogart quotes: “The problem with the world is everyone is a few drinks behind”; “Play it again, Sam”; “When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it”; “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Bogie, a brilliantly drawn adult comic book, is obtainable in French and English. There are five-foot-high likenesses of Humphrey in his traditional coat, Bogart-style fedoras, drawings, caricatures, still photographs and posters of Bogart movies from The Petrified Forest to The Harder They Fall.

  But these are only the outward symbols of the star’s pervasive influence. The character he had played so effectively in so many features began to pop up in retro mysteries and pulp crime novels. In 1939 novelist John O’Hara sadly noted, “George Gershwin died today, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.” Writers seemed to feel the same way about Humphrey Bogart. They didn’t have to believe he was gone if they didn’t want to, and they didn’t want to. It was as if they couldn’t tolerate a world bereft of Humphrey’s wounded arrogance and mordant backchat. So they brought him back, treating his character as if he were still alive, still running his café, or his private-eye office, or mining gold, or running a ship—any vocation at all, as long as he could still be counted on to entertain the world, and perhaps save it in the process.

  Humphrey was referenced in Neil Simon’s Broadway play Lost in Yonkers: “You come in here acting like you’re Humphrey Bogart or somethin’. Well, you’re no Humphrey Bogart.” He has been mentioned on all sorts of television shows, from M*A*S*H to Law and Order. In Bogie, a TV “biodrama,” Humphrey was impersonated by Kevin O’Connor. The show provided a fever chart of the Battling Bogarts, as well as a more subdued account of Humphrey and Lauren during the first weeks of their courtship.

  In movies Humphrey was imitated by the British star Albert Finney in Two for the Road and Gumshoe and mimicked by Robert Sacchi in Sam Marlowe, Private Eye, adapted from The Man with Bogart’s Face. Sacchi, said the New York Times, “who has been doing a Bogart lookalike turn on college campuses, shows considerable acting skill in the title role, although his hopes for future employment in films would seem to be limited.”

  Humphrey (along with Peter Lorre) was given a send-up in Brown Sugar, a hip-hop film. Two African American promoters, Chris (Mos Def) and Dre (Taye Diggs), argue about their latest scheme:

  CHRIS: I’m not the Humphrey Bogart in this. I’m the Peter Lorre. I’m the sidekick character. You’re the Humphrey Bogart …

  DRE: Don’t be dissin’ Humphrey Bogart, man.

  CHRIS: Why not?

  DRE: ’Cause he’s Humphrey Bogart! He’s the man. Yo, he was fightin’ a war. That’s what they did back then.

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  The image and reputation of Humphrey Bogart would be expected to run through popular culture. But rather unexpectedly, they worked their ways into high culture as well. Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul was asked about the importance of cinema during his childhood in Trinidad and afterward. The writer replied, “Without the movies I would have died.” When he saw the old features on television, he especially admired “the rich tones you get in black and white.” Among his indispensables? “I must say High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. My God, I’ve seen it so often! It is my favorite film.” This was more than the chatter of a movie buff. In his 1959 novel, Miguel Street, Naipaul introduces a character named Bogart. The year that Casablanca was made, says the narrator, Humphrey’s “fame spread like fire through Port of Spain and hundreds of young men began adopting the hardboiled Bogartian attitude.” Naipaul’s 1962 nonfiction book, The Middle Passage, offers more commentary on Humphrey’s social influence: “When Bogart, without turning, coolly rebuked a pawing Lauren Bacall, ‘You’re breathin’ down mah neck,’ Trinidad adopted him as its own. ‘That is man!’ the audience cried.”

  John Berryman’s Pulitzer Prize—winning poetry collection, Dream Songs, mentions “Bogart’s duds.” Scores of other bards refer to Bogart. The Faber Book of Movie Verse offers many poems about him, ranging from Norman Rosten’s “Nobody Dies Like Bogart” to Lee L. Berkson’s “Bogey.” Kenneth Tynan was fascinated with Humphrey Bogart, a man he had actually met only once. The British theater critic and impresario (Oh! Calcutta!) read the obituaries and essays and found them wanting. Eventually he filed his own discerning, if snobbish, essay. With seeming effortlessness, he noted, Humphrey could transfer the essence of himself to cinema. “And what was that essence? I trace it back to Seneca, of whom Bogart may not have heard.” The tragedian flourished in the first century A.D., and “what he preached and put into his plays was the philosophy known as Stoicism. It meant: accept the fact of transience, don’t panic in the face of mortality, learn to live with death. This sums up the Bogart stance.” On film Humphrey frequently died; in his first thirty-four pictures he was shot in twelve and electrocuted or hanged in eight. “ ‘We’re wrong in looking forward to death,’ says Seneca, ‘in great measure it’s past already. Death is master of all the years that are behind us.’ And Bogart’s voice told us as much. Even in the most flippant context, it carried with it a bass note of mortality.”

  Scholar and novelist Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) had his own view of Humphrey and what he brought to pictures. In Travels in Hyperreality he cites Casablanca as a prime instance of the cinema of semiotics—the interrel
ation of symbols and language. The film arrives with hidden meanings that drive its narrative: “It is not until To Have and Have Not that Bogie plays the role of the Hemingway hero, but here he appears ‘already’ loaded with Hemingwayesque connotations simply because Rick fought in Spain.” Peter Lorre trails reminiscences of Fritz Lang; Conrad Veidt’s German officer emanates a faint whiff of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Thus Casablanca became a cult movie “because it is not one movie. It is ‘movies.’ And this is the reason it works, in defiance of any aesthetic theory.” And Robert Coover, one of the most inventive novelists of his generation (The Universal Baseball Association, The Origin of the Brunists) took his own turn at Casablanca in a short story collection, A Night at the Movies.

  And still it was not enough. Inevitably, there were books about Bogart himself. Three memoirs show how elusive he was, even to those to whom he was close. Lauren Bacall’s By Myself, later expanded to By Myself and Then Some, offers some affectionate glimpses of the Bogarts’ lives and careers without giving too much away. In her debut film she was a virgin playing a woman with cat’s eyes and a slinky manner no man could resist—least of all her co-star. Director Howard Hawks ordered her “to approach a scene as a man would. He wanted insolence, and he wanted a man in control.” This was to be the hallmark of her style from then on; she would never be an Ilsa who asked Rick to do the thinking for both of them. Lauren Bacall was the brainy and sexy New Woman, and this she remained on-screen and in marriage. On the surface it was an odd combination; the poor Jewish girl who had an aristocratic bearing, and the WASP surgeon’s son who always seemed to have slept on the sidewalk the night before. They made several films together, but Lauren never again displayed the winning effrontery of To Have and Have Not. The reason is revealed in By Myself: upon marrying, she “immediately became part of Bogie’s generation.” Leaping more than two decades, she could no longer be the fresh, sexy kid with chips on both shoulders. By Myself won a National Book Award in 1980 and was generally well received. Yet there were those who remained unimpressed. The British Guardian, for example, mocked the author’s superficial name-dropping: “Cole Porter, for instance, was a ‘fairly small, very neat’ man and the food at his house was ‘incredibly good, immaculately served.…’ Only when on the subject of Bogie does she really get going, and then her adoration for him, cloying as caramel, tends to blur the man himself, so that he when he is drunk or feeling neglected, he comes over as pathetic and self-pitying.”

  Lauren makes much of her husband’s insistence on marital fidelity. To be sure, he was married four times. But, according to her account, he was serially faithful until the final, miserable days with Mayo when a nineteen-year-old ingenue hove into view. So the appearance of Verita Thompson’s Bogie and Me in 1982 came as something of a shock. Thompson’s unverified account recalls a thirteen-year love affair of Humphrey and his hairdresser—wig maker, broken off by mutual consent when she remarried. The star is quoted at length, particularly when the subject gets around to Lauren’s penchant for social climbing. “When we first met,” Humphrey tells Verita, “she talked like a goddamn dead-end kid—all deze, dem, and doze. I had to teach her English, for God’s sake, and before I knew it she was trying to go high-hat on me with her society stuff!” Though the book met a chilly critical reception, Verita remained a tireless self-promoter for the rest of her life—she died in 2002 at the age of eighty-nine. Hollywood studios showed no interest in adapting her book; she had better luck running a piano bar called Bogie and Me in New Orleans. There she informed customers that Humphrey “called me Pete, introduced me as his ‘secretary and mistress’ because, he said, ‘That’ll throw ’em off; they’ll think it’s a rib.’ He kidded me constantly. He was a sweet guy, a fascinating guy and oh, darlin’, did we have fun!”

  Of greater interest is the memoir by a man who knew Humphrey for the shortest time. Stephen Humphrey Bogart was eight years old at the time of his father’s death. Yet as he was to write in Bogart: In Search of My Father, it was only after his second marriage and the birth of two children that he “began to pull from my shoulder a chip the size of Idaho that had been there since the death of my dad.” After Humphrey’s death, and the collapse of the Bacall-Sinatra romance, Stephen’s mother abruptly sold the house and relocated the family, first to another part of Los Angeles, and then to London. “Now I was down one father, one school, one house, dozens of friends, and an entire state and country.” It was a bewildering time for him, and the beginning of a decades-long rebellion. Like Humphrey, Stephen was kicked out of a couple of schools; unlike his father, he didn’t care much for alcohol. Instead, the budding television producer sought refuge in cocaine, rebelling against the Bogart name, but also using it to advance his literary career. Stephen would write two mysteries featuring the Bogartesque shamus R.J. Brooks, who specializes in divorce business—gathering evidence to be used against adulterous husbands and wives. R.J. is not just another PI; his parents were movie stars back in the day. R.J. never did get along with his inattentive mother. But in Play It Again, she and her lover wind up dead and he feels compelled to investigate the twin slaying. Lest anyone miss the obvious connections, the paperback publisher paraphrased Sam Spade’s lines about Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon: “When your mother is murdered, you have to do something about it. It doesn’t matter if you liked her or not. She was your mother and you have to do something.” In The Remake: As Time Goes By, R.J. learns that Andromeda, one of Hollywood’s production houses, intends to remake his parents’ most famous film. Interviewed on the network news, he makes ominous comments about the studio. Shortly afterward, important Andromeda employees are knocked off. The police like Brooks for the murders.…

  Whatever their underlying purpose, these books were offered to the public as entertainment rather than therapy. Not until 1995 did Stephen write a book that dealt with his father head-on. In it, he remembers that whenever people heard his surname they inquired, “ ‘Are you related?’ And I’d say: ‘Well, no, I’m not related. If I was related, I’d be living in his mansion, right? I was named after him. My parents were fans. I have a sister, Leslie. She’s named after their daughter. That’s what big fans they were.’ ”

  He longed for someone from old Hollywood to tell him privately, “Bogie was great, but sometimes he was a prick, you know … and maybe show that the guy had some shortcomings so that I wouldn’t have to live up to a legend.” Stephen also longed for the dailiness of ordinary life, the Little League coaching, the split-level, the to-and-fro commute that most Americans do most of their lives. It was not to be an easy journey. Only at the age of forty-five, after he examined the peaks and troughs of his father’s life, was the author free to be himself. Visiting Stephen Bogart in his finally achieved New Jersey suburban home, the New York Times observed that Humphrey’s son “is neither the on-screen nor off-screen incarnation of Fred C. Dobbs, Rick Blaine, Duke Mantee, Charlie Allnut or Sam Spade, the anti-heroes of American film noir … and never wanted to be. He wanted to be, apparently, what he has struggled his whole life to become: the guy next door.”

  It was to be expected that family members would want their say. Since the early days of Hollywood, stars have always provoked memoirs from those who were closest to them, from A Quite Remarkable Father, an homage to Leslie Howard by his daughter, to Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford’s malicious portrait of her mother, Joan.

  But here it was the others, the scholars, historians, fans, and total strangers, who were unable to let go of Humphrey Bogart. They were determined to acknowledge his enduring cultural image—and in the process to enhance it. Some books attempted to summarize the private and public man. Gerald Duchovnay’s Humphrey Bogart: A Bio-Bibliography briskly discussed Humphrey’s childhood, went over his theatrical and cinematic careers, discussed the films, and listed an impressive number of articles on Bogart, film noir, and Hollywood’s golden era. Not to be outdone, Ernest W. Cunningham presented what he called, rather grandly, The Ultimate Bogart: All the
Facts and Fantasies About the Quintessential Movie Tough Guy. In addition to synopses of Humphrey’s movies and marriages, the book was filled with amusing trivia. Before he became famous (and in two instances afterward) Humphrey was slain in a variety of picturesque ways. As a felon, he was gunned down in Midnight, The Petrified Forest, Bullets or Ballots, Kid Galahad, King of the Underworld, The Roaring Twenties, Angels with Dirty Faces, Invisible Stripes, San Quentin, Virginia City, High Sierra, The Big Shot, and The Desperate Hours. He was electrocuted in The Return of Dr. X and You Can’t Get Away from Murder. He was blasted out of the sky in Body and Soul, when the kaiser’s men brought down his plane during World War I. During the next war he was slain by Nazis in Passage to Marseilles and by a Japanese officer in Tokyo Joe, and fatally wounded by a hand grenade in Sirocco. In addition he was mauled to death by a lion in The Wagons Roll at Night and beheaded by Mexican bandits in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. No other movie star had given his life so many times on the way up.

  Forty years after his death, two full-length biographies simultaneously appeared. Each offered a wealth of personal detail, accompanied by a historical overview. They were quite unlike the indulgent reminiscences of friends like Nathaniel Benchley (Humphrey Bogart), Ezra Goodman (Bogey: The Good Bad Guy), and Joe Hyams (Bogie). Or the scurrilous, allegedly tell-all volume, The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years (1899–1931), by Darwin Porter. (“Learn at last,” trumpeted the publisher, “what was really beneath the trenchcoat of America’s most famous male movie star.”) According to Porter, who used unsupported scuttlebutt by Bogart’s old rival Kenneth MacKenna, Humphrey worked secretly for Howard Hughes, procuring male prostitutes for the bisexual tycoon. The young actor was also allegedly involved with Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and Barbara Stanwyck. None of this was particularly convincing, and reviewers advised their readers to look elsewhere for real insights.