“Stephen,” she would say, “why do you always want to know the bad stuff?”
“Because that’s what would make him real to me,” I would say.
I realize now that perfect is Mom’s perception of my father, and that she was just trying to make him perfect for me. But the effect of all this, for years, was that I simply did not learn much about my father. So when I began to take more interest in my father’s life, I was especially curious about the nature of his fame. After all, his fame has caused me so much trouble that I wanted to understand it. Where did it come from? Why is it so durable when the fame of others has faded? The truth is if you had asked me to recite a filmography of Humphrey Bogart a few years ago, I would not have done any better than the average movie fan. But now I’m much more familiar with this shadow in my life known as Humphrey Bogart and I know a little more, though I suspect no one will ever completely understand the lasting impression of Bogie.
My father was not the most famous movie star of his time. Certainly Clark Gable surpassed him, and you could make a case for James Cagney and others. But today, for reasons which have been discussed many times, my father is the one that the older generation remembers and the younger generation idolizes. He is generally conceded to be the number-one movie star of all time. Stories about my father almost invariably describe him as a “legend,” a man who has a “mystique,” and the center of the “Bogart cult.” There are many reasons why my father is more famous today than when he died thirty-eight years ago. One of them is simply the fact that he was the first of his generation of movie greats to die prematurely. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper also died in their fifties, but they died after Bogie. Dying young is no guarantee of immortality, but it helps. Do you think the names Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Elvis Presley would mean quite what they do today if they had died in their eighties? Likewise, Bogie.
If there is a year marking the beginning of my father’s fame it is 1935, fourteen years before I was born. By that time he had been in dozens of Broadway plays and even a few really awful movies. In one of them, Up the River, he made his only screen appearance with Spencer Tracy. For years, Bogie had shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and Broadway with a notable lack of film success. “I wasn’t Gable and I flopped,” he said.
But in 1935, Bogie got the role of a psychopathic gangster by the name of Duke Mantee, in Robert Sherwood’s Broadway play The Petrified Forest. Over the years a lot of people have told me that when my father walked on stage as Duke Mantee you could hear a gasp from the audience, and that happened every single night. Somehow Dad created the shuffling gait of a convict who might have had his legs manacled, and his hands dangled as if they might have been recently handcuffed together. His voice was cold, his eyes heartless. At the time of the play, John Dillinger was king of the tabloids, and Bogie, they say, looked a lot like Dillinger. For years people talked about that nightly gasp in the audience and how it always seemed that John Dillinger had just walked onto the stage.
The play, with Leslie Howard as the star, was a big hit. Bogie got the best reviews of his stage career. He was hopeful that repeating the role on film would finally make him a Hollywood star. But when Warner Brothers bought the rights to film the play they announced that Mantee would be played by Edward G. Robinson. Robinson was already a major movie star, mostly playing gangsters. Bogie was pissed off. He sent a cable to Leslie Howard, because Howard (who, incidentally, was my mother’s screen idol, though she never got to meet him) had promised to help Bogie get the Mantee movie role. Howard, true to his word, told Warner Brothers that they could shove their movie if they didn’t cast Dad as Mantee, though I suppose Howard used more genteel language. The studio caved in. Bogie got the part and he was a sensation. And that is why my sister is named Leslie; she was named after Leslie Howard.
The Petrified Forest, however, did not make Bogie a movie star. Warner Brothers signed him to one of their so-called slave contracts, and they plugged him into a whole series of roles that they thought suited his “type.” During the next five years my father appeared in twenty-eight films, playing so many gangsters you would have thought he was born with a .38 in his hand. The titles say it all: Racket Busters, San Quentin, You Can’t Get Away With Murder, and so on. But Bogie never even got to be the top gangster in these flicks, because Warner Brothers already had big gangster-role stars like Robinson, James Cagney, and George Raft. Bogie did get to play a cowboy on occasion, and he had top billing from time to time, such as in Dead End, notable because it was the first film featuring the Dead End Kids.
Bogie was not great in these films—but then, the films weren’t great either. In some he was good, in others lousy. He did, however, get good at dramatic death scenes because he had lots of practice. In these gangster films, he was always getting knocked off at the end by Robinson or Cagney. He joked about how absurd it was that he, brought up in wealth and culture, was known to the public as a tough street guy. But he was not happy playing these parts. He really cared about acting, and he wanted to make something of himself as an actor.
Still, if these films do not represent Bogie at his best, they do show that he was sometimes able to make the most of roles that were as common as lice. Raymond Chandler said, “Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt. Alan Ladd is hard, bitter, and occasionally charming, but he is after all a small boy’s idea of a tough guy. Bogart is the genuine article.”
It wasn’t until 1941 and High Sierra that Bogie began to emerge as someone who would make his mark on film history. He got the role because he fought for it after George Raft turned it down. Raft did not want to die at the end. This would not be the last time that Bogie benefited from Raft’s fussiness.
In that movie, Bogie played Roy Earle, another Dillinger-like character. Earle was ruthless and cold-blooded. But somehow Bogie created sympathy for the guy, developing the Earle character as a last-of-a-dying-breed type. Audiences responded. When Earle was killed at the end of the movie, as bad guys always were in those days, the moviegoers felt sympathy instead of glee. It was probably my father’s best performance to date. The movie was a hit.
The screenwriter on High Sierra, along with W. R. Burnett, was John Huston. Later that year, Huston got his first directing assignment. The movie was The Maltese Falcon, and it was to star George Raft. Raft said no. This time he was afraid of jeopardizing his career by working with a new director. Right. Anybody could see that Huston had no future as a director. So, Bogie got the role, and Huston was happy to have him.
In The Maltese Falcon, Bogie was on the right side of the law, more or less, as Dashiell Hammett’s private eye Sam Spade, another self-sufficient loner type. Bogie was still ruthless, but now it was ruthlessness in the name of principles.
The Maltese Falcon had been made twice before, but this time they did it right and the movie was a big success. My mother thinks it is the movie against which all other private-eye films are judged.
In one of his most famous scenes, Bogie tells Mary Astor that he is “sending her over,” for killing his partner. They supposedly love each other, but Bogie says, “I don’t care who loves you. I won’t play the sap for you. You killed Miles and you’re going over for it.” He tells her, “I hope they don’t hang you by your sweet neck. If you’re a good girl you’ll be out in twenty years and you’ll come back to me. If they hang you, I’ll always remember you.”
This, I guess, is the beginning of Bogie as Mr. Cool. Richard Brooks, the director, says, “Finally, the film was done the way it was written. The whole purpose of the story was that his partner was killed and a woman who got him killed was trying to make love to Bogie on the couch. And she wanted to go free. And when he finally says to her, ‘I have to send you over, somebody has to take the fall,’ they loved him for it because he could do it and maybe we couldn’t do it.”
Alistair Cooke knew my father and he says that The Maltese Falcon was the film that finally isol
ated my father’s character. “That was the quintessential Bogart,” he says. “All that matters is what is going on in your father’s mind. You could see everything in his face. The camera loved Bogie. He was born to be in films.”
Richard Schickel, the movie critic for Time, says that The Maltese Falcon was the movie that put Bogie over the top as a star. “The public now had what it required of all movie stars in those days,” Schickel says, “a firm sense of his character, a feeling that they knew what they were bargaining for when they paid their money to see a Bogart picture. And from this point onward, with his name fixed firmly above the title, in the first billing position he would never again be forced to relinquish, that is what he appeared in: Bogart pictures. He had become what a star had to be, a genre unto himself.”
In 1943 came the next big magnification of the Bogart star. It was my father’s forty-fifth movie, Casablanca, which, even though it won the Oscar for best picture, has been called “the best bad movie ever made.” It is also, of my father’s five most important films, the only one that was not written or directed by John Huston. Alistair Cooke says, “Bogie’s continuing fame is a mystery but a lot of it is tied up in that film, Casablanca.”
“Casablanca was never supposed to be anything special,” Julius Epstein told me. Epstein, along with his twin brother, Philip, and Howard Koch, wrote the screenplay. “In those days the studios owned the theaters and each studio made a picture a week. Casablanca was just one more picture. It was corny and it was sentimental, and your father made a lot of better films that don’t get as much attention. But somehow magic happened and it became a classic.”
Epstein went on to say, “The first preview was not a howling success. The movie did not become the cult film it is now until after your father died.”
Though Casablanca went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director, and my father got his first Best Actor nomination, the road to being a classic was not a smooth ride. “We were making changes in the script every day during shooting,” Epstein says. “Your father didn’t like that. He was a professional, always prepared, and he didn’t like sloppiness. But that’s what it was. We were handing in dialogue hours, even minutes, before it was to be shot.”
No one really knew where the picture was going or how it was going to end. All of this, of course, raised havoc with characterizations. Ingrid Bergman recalls in her book, My Story, “Every morning we said, ‘Well, who are we, what are we doing here?’ And Michael Curtiz, the director, would say, ‘We’re not quite sure, but let’s get through this scene today and we’ll let you know tomorrow.’”
In fact, the famous ending of the movie where my father says to Claude Rains, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” was not the only ending planned. Curtiz also planned to shoot an ending in which Bergman stays with Bogart. It was only after the “beautiful friendship” line was shot that Curtiz knew he had something perfect and decided to go with it.
It was a difficult movie for my father. He spent most of his time in his trailer. He was not happy with the part at first. He wanted to get the girl, but so did Paul Henreid, because that, to some extent, was the definition of stardom: the guy who got the girl was the star. But Bogie also worried that the public would not believe that a woman as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman could fall for a guy who looked like him. He was, after all, a five-foot-ten, 155-pound, forty-four-year-old, balding man who had spent most of his film life playing snarling triggermen.
Dad was also troubled by the fact that, in the original script, Rick Blaine was a bit of a whiner, and that Rick didn’t actually do much of anything. So the role was beefed up.
The role became more challenging. Dad had to convince his audience that Rick was a man’s man, a tough guy, but that he also could be brought close to tears by the sound of “As Time Goes By” played on the piano by Dooley Wilson as Sam. (By the way, Bogie never said, “Play it again, Sam.”)
My father, I have learned, was not a ladies’ man, in real life, or on film. In fact, his aloofness with women on screen, the ease with which he could turn a dame into the cops if she was bad, is one of the things that makes him attractive both to men and women. Casablanca was probably his most romantic role, and even then most of the romance is in the back story.
Bogie, with not a lot of experience in romantic parts, took advice on how to play it. His friend Mel Baker told him, “This is the first time you’ve ever played the romantic lead against a major star. You stand still, and always make her come to you. Mike [Curtiz, the director] probably won’t notice it, and if she complains you can tell her it’s tacit in the script. You’ve got something she wants, so she has to come to you.”
Whatever my father did worked. Casablanca turned Bogie into a sex symbol. As Rick Blaine he represented one of what Ingrid Bergman called “the two poles of male attractiveness.” Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo was the other. Laszlo was honest, responsible, conservative, and fatherly. Bogie, as Rick, was sexy, romantic, irresponsible, and funny. In other words: dangerous. Women love rascals.
“I didn’t do anything I’ve never done before,” Bogie said, “but when the camera moves in on that Bergman face, and she’s saying she loves you, it would make anybody look romantic.”
In fact, the chemistry between my father and Bergman was so palpable that many people thought they must have had something going on off the screen. But the truth is they were practically strangers.
“I kissed him,” Bergman says, “but I never knew him.”
Bob Williams, who was the studio’s publicist on the film, has said that he thinks my father was in love with Ingrid Bergman, and that a romance might have developed if he were not married to the fanatically jealous Mayo Methot at the time. “Bogie was kind of jealous if I would bring another man onto the set to see her,” Williams says. “He would sulk. I think he was kind of smitten with her.”
Perhaps. But my father was not the kind to flirt with his costars. He was more inclined to retire to his trailer and study his script or play chess, in this case with Howard Koch.
Nobody can say for sure why Casablanca has become the beloved film that it is, or why so many lines from it have become installed in our language. All I know is that I would be a very rich man if I got a quarter every time somebody said to me, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” or “We’ll always have Paris,” or “Here’s looking at you, kid,” or “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” and on and on. Barely a day goes by that I don’t see or hear some reference to Bogie on the news, and most commonly it is one of the Casablanca lines. Even Secretary of State Warren Christopher summed up his comments on the GATT Treaty: “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Casablanca was truly a serendipitous combination of things. But if the soul of my father’s fame is the merging of his real self with his screen image, as film historians have suggested, then Casablanca probably is the best example of that merging.
Perhaps this is the phenomenon that Bergman is talking about when she writes that she came to Hollywood troubled by the fact that in Hollywood you were expected to play some version of yourself in every film. She was from Sweden where actors played different ages, different ethnic groups, people very different from who they really were. She says that Michael Curtiz told her, “American audiences pay their money to see Gary Cooper being Gary Cooper, not the Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Rick Blaine was not a clone of Humphrey Bogart, but he was a hell of a lot closer to being my father than any of those gun-toting gangsters ever had been.
Richard Schickel puts it this way: “What Bogart found in Rick Blaine was something more interesting than Tough Guy, no less complex than Existential Hero, but much more appealing—to some of us, at least—than both. For Rick was but a minor variation on the role Bogart had himself been playing most of his adult life. A role he had taken up with particular relish when he made his permanent residence in Hollywood. It was the role of Declassed Gentleman. A man of b
reeding and privilege who found himself far from his native haunts, among people of rather less quality, rather fewer standards morally, socially, intellectually, than he had been raised to expect to find among his acquaintances. Rick Blaine should not have ended up running a gin joint in Casablanca, and Humphrey Bogart should not have ended up being an actor in Hollywood.”
I think Curtiz and Schickel are, at least partially, right. The movie stars who endure, including my father, often play a big part of themselves. Nonetheless, the next three important films in the Bogie cult were movies in which Dad played parts much further from himself than Rick Blaine or Sam Spade were.
In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is my favorite, Dad was no confident, highly principled Sam Spade. He played a paranoid gold prospector. Huston directed and had a cameo part. Walter Huston, John’s father, was in the film and he won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor while John was winning the Oscar for Best Director. My father got his second Oscar nomination for that film.
While this was one of my father’s favorite roles, Sam Jaffe says that Bogie had some reservations at first.
“Your father came to me one day and said, ‘Have you read the script for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?’ I said yes. He made a face. I said, ‘Bogie, I can see that something’s bothering you.’ It seemed to me that he was concerned about the size of the part, since he had already done The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca by this point. I said to him, ‘I don’t know if you are considering not doing this, but you’re a great friend of John Huston and you have great respect for Walter Huston. There is nothing wrong with being second in a movie that stars Walter Huston and is directed by John Huston. You may have some doubts, but let me say that if you don’t do this picture, it won’t get made because they won’t make a picture with Walter and another actor. And what will happen to your relationship with John Huston? You will crush John. I want to relieve your mind that you will not be hurt by playing in this movie. You’ll be good in the picture and people will not say, Oh, Bogie’s not important anymore because he is being second to Walter Huston.’”
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