Ann M. Sperber’s massive biography of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (Murrow: His Life and Times) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Her next subject was Humphrey. She devoted seven years to researching aspects of his personal life and acting career, interviewing nearly two hundred people along the way. But after she had accumulated a quarter ton of material, Sperber suddenly died of a heart attack in the winter of 1994. Bogart, a 675-page tome, was completed two years later by a collaborator she had never met: Eric Lax, Woody Allen’s witty biographer. This unorthodox collaboration worked surprisingly well. Its man-behind-the-myth technique offered few surprises. But as the narrative traced Humphrey’s professional and personal arcs it compiled a wealth of diverting anecdotes and incidents. Here is the confused child of quarreling parents, marked forever by his strong-willed mother and withdrawn and cantankerous father; here is the rebellious youth, the pretty-boy juvenile, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking abrasive character actor, the young Hollywood failure, the middle-aged Hollywood success, the husband as three-time loser, the romantic legend of Bogart and Baby, the accolades, the rise to superstar, the stoic last year, the stuff that dreams are made of.
What that great doorstop of a book lacked was a verdict. This was supplied by Jeffrey Meyers in his competing biography, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood. Meyers noted with some satisfaction that Humphrey Bogart “survived twenty-five years in Hollywood without a drug problem, a nervous breakdown, or a psychiatrist.” Yet, as the biographer explains, the star of stars was more than a survivor. Meyers had previously written a biography of Ernest Hemingway, and noted the many similarities between Ernest and Humphrey. Both men came from well-to-do families; both had physician fathers who met bad ends—Clarence Hemingway committed suicide, Belmont Bogart destroyed himself with morphine addiction—and mothers who chose artistic vocations (Grace Hemingway was an opera singer and painter; Maud Bogart, as we have seen, a prominent illustrator). Both were political liberals, both men had four wives, both were overfond of alcohol, both were notorious for riding friends and foes alike. Humphrey referred to it as “needling”; Ernest called it “talking rough.” Either man could spot a phony through lead walls.
But likenesses can be deceiving. James Cagney, who grew up in a poor, gritty New York neighborhood at about the same time the Bogarts were enjoying a life of indulgence, watched Humphrey in action on- and off-screen. “When it came to fighting,” said Cagney, Bogart “was about as tough as Shirley Temple.” Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey’s fellow villain, felt somewhat the same way. He wrote, “For all his outward toughness, insolence, braggadocio, and contempt … there came through a kind of sadness, loneliness, and heartbreak (all of which were very much a part of Bogie the man). I always felt sorry for him—sorry that he imposed on himself the façade of the character with which he had become identified.”
Cagney and Robinson, as well as many of their colleagues, took pains to distance themselves from the characters they played, and even from the industry that had made them headliners. Cagney, for example, lived geographically and psychologically as far from Beverly Hills as he could get, operating a hundred-acre farm on Martha’s Vineyard. Robinson stayed west, but made certain that journalists knew that his was one of the most impressive private art collections in America, with works by Gauguin, Degas, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. Bogart, on the other hand, was a creature of Hollywood. His image was constructed by Warner Bros. and burnished by other film companies and most of all by Humphrey, who played the part of the surly paladin on screen and off for three decades. He had not begun that way; it was as if the juvenile lead of the 1920s had acted out the folktale of the man who puts on a mask, can’t remove it, and eventually becomes the disguise.
Yet in the end, it is Humphrey who outpointed his contemporaries and outlasted them.
Why?
He wasn’t better looking than Gary Cooper, or more lithe than Cagney, or more authoritative than Robinson, or jauntier than Cary Grant, or warmer than James Stewart, or more versatile than Spencer Tracy. Something else was at work here. In a characteristically discerning essay, film scholar and director Peter Bogdanovich analyzed Humphrey’s durability: “He was a man who tried very hard to be Bad because he knew it was easier to get along in the world that way.” In film after film he went from belligerent neutrality to reluctant commitment—from “I stick my neck out for nobody” to “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” By the finale, if he was asked why he sacrificed himself he might say, “Maybe ’cause I like you. Maybe ’cause I don’t like them.” Of course, Bogdanovich continued, “it was always ‘maybe’ because he wasn’t going to be that much of a sap, wasn’t making any speeches, wasn’t going to be a good guy. Probably he rationalized it: ‘I’m just doing my job.’ But we felt good inside. We knew better.”
Take It and Like It, Jonathan Coe’s coffee-table-book tribute, borrows its title from a line Sam Spade delivers to Joel Cairo after the little man has been slapped by Brigid O’Shaughnessy. The British journalist concludes that “arguments over Humphrey’s personal qualities will continue to recede helplessly into history,” but the fact remains that “nobody walks out of one of the great Bogart movies without having seen something that uplifts and enriches.” His films and his career “teach us a strategy, and a very wholesome one, for dealing with life at its best and its worst. Take it and like it.”
In Bogie, another lavishly illustrated volume, film historian Richard Schickel adds that Humphrey “perfectly embodied some of the simple, admirable qualities once held to distinguish the American character,” among them “a capable self-sufficiency and a refusal to be pushed around.” As an actor he was “authoritative, professional, and secure. In his life as well as his screen persona, Bogie was his own man.”
These detailed, posthumous appraisals were on the money. And still something was missing. It had to do with the larger theme of American masculinity. In the years since Humphrey’s death, both the definition and the image of the male role had drastically changed. Once upon an epoch the nuclear family was dominant, the husband/father was the main provider, his actions prescribed by tradition. As a leader, as a breadwinner, as a husband and lover, he was expected to look and speak and behave in a certain manner. Humphrey defined that figure, and it accounted for his eminence in the 1940s and ’50s.
But the mainstream of American life has completely changed in the ensuing decades. Feminism; gay rights; androgynous models; the metrosexual man, straight but interested in fashion—all were co-opted by Hollywood. By the rules of history, Humphrey Bogart should have become obsolete, a faded image totally obscured by new faces and fresh interpretations of the male role.
Instead, he became more prominent, looming larger as we moved away from his epoch. For what he offered was more than a re-creation of movies past, where men were men and women were unemployed. His masculinity was not swagger, but its opposite—a quiet, bitter recognition of reality and the way in which it had to be acknowledged, approached, and, on occasion, opposed: Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid. As American life coarsened, as flamboyance and the desire to “let it all hang out” elbowed reticence out of the way, as reality shows replaced scripted dialogue and shouting became a substitute for political debate, the curt, stiff-lipped men that Humphrey Bogart represented on-screen, and the sharp-witted individual that he was off-screen, took on a meaning far beyond sentiment. They stood for values that certain men and women—most of them far too young to remember him in his heyday—remembered and romanticized.
CHAPTER 10
The Greatest Gift
i
Some forty years after his death, Humphrey Bogart attained a summit no other actor had ever reached. The American Film Institute ranked him as the Greatest Male Star in cinema history. The honors were only beginning. In 1997 Entertainment Weekly designated Humphrey the Number One
Movie Legend of all time. That year the United States Postal Service issued a stamp bearing his likeness. At a ceremony in Hollywood Lauren Bacall and her children, Stephen and Leslie, heard an announcement from Tirso del Junco, chairman of the USPS board of governors: “Today, we mark another chapter in the Bogart legacy. With an image that is small and yet as powerful as the ones he left in celluloid, we will begin today to bring his artistry, his power, his unique star quality, to the messages that travel the world.”
Nine years later, Lauren and Stephen again stood side by side, this time in the rain, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As they watched, a portion of 103rd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue was officially named Humphrey Bogart Place. “Bogie would never have believed it,” Lauren told a group of city officials and onlookers huddling under umbrellas. The block where Humphrey grew up had changed considerably since the days of Belmont and Maud Bogart. That brownstone was now the property of the city’s housing authority, part of a low-income housing development known as the Douglass Rehabs. But the bronze plaque gleamed through the wet weather, as if it were adorning a town house on the Upper East Side, where Dr. Bogart would surely have settled if he had been practicing medicine in the late twentieth century. After the ceremony, all the attendees mounted the steps and traced the letters with their fingers:
THIS SITE IS THE CHILDHOOD HOME OF
HUMPHREY DEFOREST BOGART
1899–1957
Mr. Bogart lived at this site from the time he was born until 1923. During a film career that spanned almost 30 years and 75 films, Mr. Bogart became not only a mythical American hero but a popular culture icon known worldwide.
“He was endowed with the greatest gift a person can have: talent. The whole world came to recognize it.”
JOHN HUSTON
ii
In the summer of 2008, New York Times columnist Sharon Waxman remarked on an extraordinary sociological shift. HOLLYWOOD’S HE-MEN ARE BUMPED BY SENSITIVE GUYS, read the headline. For her detailed analysis Waxman quoted Debra Zane, a prominent casting director. “They are always looking for the macho man,” she stated, “but they are pulling from this other group, who are strong but more overtly sensitive and more emotionally available, because that’s what there is right now.” Zane noted a shortage of the “man’s man.” Always in demand, they were “in short supply. And why is that? I don’t know.…”
Waxman had some ideas. The softer-edged actors, she wrote, may reflect “a more feminized American society, the rise of the metrosexual male and the absence, until recently, of war and true hardship in the last two decades of American life.” She interviewed a group of movie veterans. They contrasted the unlined and unfinished countenances of present-day stars and “the generation of actors who came out of the Depression or wartime, when hardship could be read in the faces of stars like Humphrey Bogart.…”
Variety followed up that story with one of its own. “Where have the manly movie stars gone?” asked columnist Anne Thompson. “Not so long ago, Hollywood’s male stars were men’s men. Think Humphrey Bogart.…” As masculine archetypes, the younger actors failed to impress her; Johnny Depp was “fey” in his Pirates of the Caribbean series, Brendan Fraser (of the Mummy films) was “goofy.” Tom Cruise appeared to be “out of his league” in mature parts, and comic-book superheroes Brandon Routh (Superman), Edward Norton (the Incredible Hulk), and Tobey Maguire (Spider-Man) were all “boy-men.” Director Frank Miller agreed with Thompson. “Hollywood is great at producing male actors,” he complained, “but sucks at producing men.” Searching for someone to play The Spirit, he interviewed scores of candidates and “found them all too much like boys.” Somehow, American actors seemed unable to demonstrate a wide-screen virility. “When we want a tough guy,” observed Jim Gianopulos, a co-chairman of Fox, “we go to Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman [both Australian] or Colin Farrell [an Irishman].”
Harvey C. Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard, set down his views in the deliberately controversial Manliness, lamenting the lack of male role models like Humphrey Bogart. In Casablanca, for example, Rick’s character “was confident and cynical—cool before ‘cool’ was invented.” As Mansfield saw it, our society has adopted “a practice of equality between the sexes that has never been known before in all human history.” In his eyes this was a sign of unrest, and possibly of things much more dire. Without a restoration of old values, the entire social structure was up for grabs. For manliness “restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks.”
Others chimed in, among them Guy Garcia, whose book The Decline of Men insisted that in the United States, postmodern males are “caught between the desire to conform to a kinder, gentler masculinity and a competing urge to swing from the trees and bring home a fresh kill for dinner.” The shelf of lamentations widened to include Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, James Gilbert’s Men in the Middle, Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males, and Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males.
It was all too much for columnist James Wolcott. In Vanity Fair he decried the “pathos, self-recrimination, and pathological dysfunction” of his fellow men. For him, the primary threat to the psychological well-being of most men wasn’t “sexual or pop-cultural but economic, the fear that a single swing of the ax could render one destitute and undo everything one has attempted to build.”
There is some validity to these economic and sexual observations. The trouble is that they’re not new. Times have proved difficult in the first decade of the new millennium, with a chaos of bankruptcies and unemployment reaching 10 percent. But back in the early 1930s one in four Americans was unable to find work. From the corner office to the waterfront, everyone walked on eggs. Conditions were so dire that most Americans considered themselves a paycheck away from poverty, and versions of the “one ax” phrase were repeated around kitchen tables and factories across the country. The psyche of the American male was thought to be so lacerated it might not survive the Depression intact. During those years Humphrey, as apprehensive as any other workingman whose job was on the line, wasted no time on self-pity. He was too busy trying to stay afloat in a harsh, unforgiving company town. He became particularly adept at playing individuals under stress. Audiences, similarly afflicted, felt that he understood them and they made him a star.
As for that beleaguered American male: it’s true that women now outnumber men at American law schools, and that there are more female senators and Supreme Court justices than ever before. Yet only 16 percent of the U.S. House and Senate are female, and of the Fortune 500 companies, 84 percent of the CEOs are male. The male ego is something else: that has been fragile for generations. Back in 1977 literary critic Wilfrid Sheed observed, “The prodigious success of Life with Father—a play about a late Victorian patriarch whose self-esteem has to be fostered like a house plant by the rest of the family—should have told us something.” Life with Father opened at the end of the Depression, in 1939, the year that Humphrey appeared in The Roaring Twenties. It closed 3,224 performances later, in 1947, when he was filming The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Between these terminals, feminism grew in stature and power. Humphrey was no stranger to the movement. Maud Bogart had been a vigorous proponent; mother and son witnessed its progress from the days of the suffragettes to the epoch of Rosie the Riveter. If Humphrey felt threatened, however, he never let it show in his work, and his popularity among women remained untouched by social evolutions.
So there must be an additional key to Bogart’s forward march through the epochs of the Great War, Prohibition, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, the New Deal, World War II, the postwar euphoria of the 1950s, and on to the present day. That key has little to do with the battle of the sexes, the economic upheavals of the new millennium, or the country’s current moral tone. Here it is:
The principal reason there never will, never can, be another Humphrey Bogart gla
res from the screens of every multiplex. When Humphrey began acting in films, demographics were irrelevant: everyone went to the picture show. Adolescent actors like Mickey Rooney and Deanna Durbin had their moments, but there were few teenage movies as such. Those under twenty were deemed insignificant, and in any case had no economic power. Studios produced films for the adults who controlled the purse strings. It didn’t matter if the actors were heading toward middle age; so was a large part of the audience. Ergo, when a forty-two-year-old Bogart finally achieved leading-man status in The Maltese Falcon, he felt right for the role.
The move toward youthful male stars began in the early 1950s, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the studios to divest themselves of the film theaters they owned or controlled. Just as they were losing the power of “block booking”—dictating what features movie houses could show—television began to eat away at the potential audience. Then came the baby boomers. The suburbs grew, and with them came malls, smaller film houses, and drive-ins. Each year the filmgoing audience grew younger, with attendance shifting toward unmarried twentysomethings and teenagers. The remaining studios tried all sorts of gimmicks—imports, VistaVision, Todd-AO, Cinemascope 3-D, and so on. Humphrey continued to star, but the mature audience was drifting away. “It soon became a chicken-and-egg thing,” maintains a Paramount executive. “The grownups said, ‘If you’d make adult movies we’d come back to the theater.’ And we said, ‘If you’d come back to the theater we’d make adult movies.’ Neither side budged, and one day it went past the point of no return.” From then on, if films were going to turn big profits, the producers had to look elsewhere. As the statistics show, they did exactly that. Today, these are the twenty highest-grossing films in American history:
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