Bogart

by Stephen Humphrey Bogart

  If my father was not quite as passionate for Stevenson as my mother, it might have been that she was much younger and more prone to political optimism. And also to the fact that she was a woman.

  My mother is quite candid about the fact that she was smitten with Adlai Stevenson. After one trip to a Stevenson event, where she got to know him personally, she says, “On the trip home I was far away from Bogie, my thoughts on the man I had left behind. I tried to imagine his life. I had found out as much as I could from his friends, anyone who had known him in the last few years. In my usual way, I romanticized that he needed a wife—obviously his sister had taken the official place of one, but he needed someone to share his life with. I fantasized that I would be a long-distance partner, a pen pal, a good friend whom he could feel free to talk to about anything. A sympathetic, nonjudging ear. It took me a long time to dissect my feelings, but at that moment I felt a combination of hero worship and slight infatuation. This campaign had disrupted my life completely. I was flattered to have been included, flattered to have been singled out by Stevenson as someone a bit special. I was, after all, just twenty-eight years old. I’d just had a second baby and had been preoccupied with domesticity for the last couple of years. My career was at something of a standstill. I needed to dream. I needed to reach out, to stretch myself, to put my unused energies to use.”

  Not surprisingly, there were times when my father got sick of hearing “Adlai this,” and “Adlai that,” all the time, but his occasional fits of jealousy never got in the way of his political convictions. Bogie supported Stevenson, and Stevenson was grateful. (On the whole, my mother’s relationship with Stevenson was a very positive force in her life, and I can remember playing on his farm not long after my father died because Stevenson was, for her, the kind of friend you turn to at such a time.)

  Alistair Cooke, who also favored Stevenson, was sure that Eisenhower would win the election. He tells me that he made a ten-dollar bet with my father that Adlai would lose. When Ike won Bogie paid up, but not without a comment: “It’s a hell of a guy who bets against his own principles,” Bogie said. (Cooke, by the way, could vote in the election. He is an American citizen. A lot of people think he is a British subject because of all those Masterpiece Theatres he hosted.)

  Because my father was a famous actor, he caught a lot of flack for taking public stands on political issues. In 1944, when he spoke up for Roosevelt in a radio speech, Bogie was assaulted with sacks of hate mail, mostly to the effect that actors should have no political opinions and if they do have them, they should keep them to themselves.

  Dad didn’t care for the mail. He shot back at his detractors in newspaper interviews and in a piece he wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, titled, “I Stuck My Neck Out.” By this time his old friend Stuart Rose, now a former brother-in-law, was editor of the Post.

  Bogie had little patience with the view that actors should keep their political opinions secret simply because their personal glamor might swing a few votes one way or the other. He said that idea was “idiotic.”

  “I dislike politics and politicians, but I love my country,” he said. “Why should a man lose the freedom to express himself simply because he’s an actor? Nobody ever suggests that a baseball star or a best-selling author should refrain from public discussion of political issues. I don’t think anyone, and I mean anyone, should toss around a lot of political baloney, but I feel I know as much about politics and government as most guys on a soap box and if I disagree strongly with them I’m going to say so.”

  In 1950 when he was campaigning for Helen Douglas, the subject came up again. “Movie stars pay a tremendous income tax,” Bogie said. “I don’t even look at my paycheck. Just put my hand over it and sign it. It would buy an airplane, I’ll tell you that. Anyone who pays $200,000 a year in income taxes darned well has a right to take an active role in politics. Of course, there are some Republicans who feel that a movie star should not have the right to engage in politics if he is a Democrat.”

  By this time my father was the highest-paid movie star at Warner, and had, in some years, been the highest paid in the world, though his paycheck was paltry by today’s Hollywood standards. He had signed a fifteen-year contract with Warner Brothers in 1945 that, Benchley says, gave Bogie a million dollars a year.

  Once when he was asked if he thought politicking would hurt his career, he said, “I think there are a few diehards in the backwoods of Pasadena or Santa Barbara who might not see my pictures because I’m a Democrat. But on the whole I don’t think it makes much difference. People forget quickly, as soon as the election is over, whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. If you make a good picture and give a good performance people will go to see it anyway.”

  Perhaps. But there came a time when politics threatened to hurt a lot of careers and did, in fact, destroy some.

  In October of 1947, three years before crazy Joe McCarthy got his witch hunt underway, a publicity-hungry congressman by the name of J. Parnell Thomas chaired something called The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Thomas decided that it was extremely urgent that the committee find Commies in the movie industry. Thomas, with the help of aides like Richard Nixon, came to Hollywood for “interviews,” at which movie people were asked who they thought might be a Communist. People who gave names were considered “friendly.” In reaction to this, nineteen Hollywood writers, directors, and producers formed a group that said it was none of Congress’s business what their politics were or had been. Of those nineteen, eleven were asked to testify before Congress. One of the eleven, Bertolt Brecht (the guy who wrote The Threepenny Opera), skipped town. He went back to his home in Germany. The rest became known as the “Unfriendly Ten.” A lot of people in the movie industry were outraged. They felt as if the ten were being accused of something, without being given a trial. They also thought that Congress should be making laws, not trying to enforce them. John Huston got a bunch of these movie people together and they formed The Committee for the First Amendment. Their purpose was never specifically to defend the Unfriendly Ten. It was to fight what they believed was an assault upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  Huston, in fact, said some of these people really were Communists. “But they were well-meaning people who had no knowledge of the Gulag Archipelago or of Stalin’s mass murders,” he said. Huston went to a few Communist meetings and he found it all very childish. “I marveled at the innocence of these good but simple people who actually believed that this was a way of improving the social condition of mankind.”

  When an attorney for the Unfriendly Ten asked Huston for support, he got together a planeload of movie stars and, with Howard Hughes supplying the plane, they all went to Washington. Among them: Danny Kaye, Sterling Hayden, Richard Conte, Gene Kelly, Ira Gershwin. And my parents. “I remember going to a meeting that John organized at William Wyler’s house,” my mother recalls. “I told your father ‘we have to go.’”

  When it came time for testimony, the movie stars were there for moral support. The ten, led by writer Dalton Trumbo, told Thomas in so many words to shove his committee where the sun don’t shine. They refused to answer questions, citing their First Amendment right to freedom of speech. But they did read statements. They wanted the Supreme Court to rule on whether or not the committee had the right to make a Communist identify himself as one.

  Thomas banged his gavel and vowed to put them in jail for contempt of Congress.

  The press, which until then had been friendly, now turned against the ten and against the Committee for the First Amendment. Soon the committee was being described as a Communist front organization, and one columnist wrote, “There is very good evidence that John Huston is the brains of the Communist party in the west.”

  After that Washington trip my father did some serious backtracking. He felt as if he had gone out on a limb, and had been assured that the Unfriendly Ten had been unjustly maligned. Now, as it became clear that some of them were Communists, Bogi
e was pissed because he felt as if he had been used.

  “I am not a Communist,” he said. “I detest communism as any other decent American does. I have never in my life been identified with any Communistic front organization. I went to Washington because I thought fellow Americans were being deprived of their Constitutional rights and for that reason alone.

  “I see now that my trip was ill-advised, foolish, and impetuous, but at the time it seemed the thing to do. I acted impetuously and foolishly on the spur of the moment, like I am sure many other American citizens do at many times.”

  He told Ed Sullivan, “I’m about as much in favor of communism as J. Edgar Hoover. I despise communism and I believe in our American brand of democracy. Our planeload of movie people who flew to Washington came east to fight against censorship being clamped on the movies. The ten men cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee are certainly not typical of Hollywood. On every occasion at Washington we stressed our opposition to Lawson and his crew, so there could be no doubt as to where we stood. In fact, before we left Hollywood we carefully screened every performer so that no red or pink could infiltrate and sabotage our purpose.”

  My father’s reaction had many interpretations. Some people felt that he was copping out, just trying to protect his career. Others say that he just didn’t want to be part of something that he couldn’t control. My mother, always looking for the best in Bogie, says that he realized that he was misled and he was angry about it.

  I’ve given this some thought. I’m not sure that my mother’s view makes sense. It seems to me that if Bogie and the others went to Washington to defend a principle, not the ten accused, then that principle didn’t change just because some of the ten really were Communists. If he went to defend constitutional rights, then how was he misled or ill-advised? I happen to think that Bogie was wrong here, just as I have been wrong about hundreds of things. Maybe he was just trying to save his career. Maybe he was a human being and was expressing the simple human desire for self-preservation. Dad, apparently, came to feel the same way about his change of heart. Mother says, “He felt coerced into it, and he was never proud of it.”

  The ten were eventually convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to jail, some for as much as a year. One ironic twist, which I found satisfying: Some of them were sent to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and one of their fellow inmates was none other than J. Parnell Thomas, the great, self-righteous, Commie-hunter. Turns out he was a scummy little crook who was bagged for padding a payroll and taking kickbacks.

  My father’s role in the Unfriendly Ten, of getting involved politically and then dropping out, would not make for good cinema. Much more effective is the reverse, which is what Bogie often played in films: the man who does not want to get involved, wants to be left alone, but is eventually drawn in and compelled to take a side because a principle is at stake. Remember Charlie Allnut in The African Queen? When Hepburn’s character suggests that they cruise on down the river and blow up a German ship he tells her she is nuts and he wants no part of it. Of course, he ends up designing his own torpedo and going after the Germans with Hepburn.

  Casablanca is, of course, the classic example. Rick Blaine was this tough American who ran a cafe in Morocco. Even though he was flanked on every side by someone’s political passion, he was the kind of guy who didn’t take sides. He was cynical about all causes and he wanted to be left out of them. He was not into patriotism or nationalism or any other ism. But in the end he did the decent thing and he didn’t expect to be praised for it. Rick was the guy that a lot of people want to be.

  Was my father like Rick Blaine? Yes, in many ways. I don’t think Dad was big on isms, either. He had ideals, but he was skeptical when other people talked about their ideals. He was big on compassion and loyalty, but his eyes tended to glaze over when other people went on too much about how compassionate and loyal they were. Maybe Rick Blaine would have handled the Unfriendly Ten controversy differently, but hell, nobody can be like Rick Blaine all the time, not even Humphrey Bogart.

  Whether my father was a Rick Blaine or not, there is no question that Casablanca was the movie that gave the public its most memorable political image of Humphrey Bogart.

  Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father is a legend, and a lot of it is tied up in that film, Casablanca. It was a stroke of colossal luck, that film appearing at a time when Hitler had demonstrated something we were loathe to admit: the success of violence. Casablanca first came to theaters just eighteen days after the Allied landing in Casablanca. This was one of the first great blows against Hitler. Then later, when they put the film in wider release, what was going on? Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were holding a summit conference. And where were they holding it? Casablanca. Was it any wonder that the public got your father’s character all mixed up with reality?”

  Cooke is right when he says there was a lot of luck involved. But Warner Brothers gave luck a little help. The movie was scheduled to be released later in 1943, but they rushed it to theaters after the Allied invasion of Casablanca in November of 1942.

  Cooke, I found, was particularly interested not in Bogie’s politics, so much as the effect that world politics had on my father’s career. He says, “The gangster film fell out of favor when World War Two came along. How could you get excited about gangsters shooting a few people, when Hitler was doing things that Warner Brothers could never dream up? And out of the top gangster stars, like Robinson, and Cagney, and Raft, it was your father who seemed best suited to go up against Nazis in the movies.”

  Cooke once wrote of Bogie, “He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stages and drawing rooms of the twenties, that he was being saved and soured by time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s new order.”

  *

  Like most people, my father was more likely to jump into a political issue that directly affected him. One of them was censorship.

  In the late 1940s, with Hitler vanquished, gangsters were popular in films again and there was a lot of whining and hand wringing about the rising number of crime movies. For a short time crime movies were even banned by the Johnston office, which was the Hollywood censorship office at the time. The ban, like most censorship attempts, was effective only for a brief time. Soon more crime movies were reaching the screen and many people were upset.

  Though my father had little patience with the complainers, he did concede a few points for their side. Discussing one recent prison movie he said, “It was a story of a bunch of bad eggs who broke out of stir and finally were put back where they belonged. I can see no reason for the picture.” (This was a sentiment he had expressed before. Once, when his friend Mark Hellinger called to see what Bogie thought of the prison movie Brute Force, Bogie replied, “Why did you make it? A picture should have either entertainment or a moral. This one had neither.”)

  “But it’s stupid to think that movies can foster crime,” Bogie said. “When I was young we were reading about Billy the Kid. But that didn’t make criminals out of us. If you want to find out what turns kids to crime look at their environment and particularly their family life. Parents who let ten-year-old kids stay out at night are the ones responsible for making criminals.”

  Dad deplored censorship and he said it would backfire. “The Johnston office made a ruling that a criminal can’t use a sawed-off shotgun or a tommy gun in pictures,” he said. “And movie cops have to be big and there has to be lots of them. So when you show a capture it appeals to a child’s favor of the underdog. Like when I got caught in High Sierra. I was up on that mountain with the whole state against me.”

  Writing in the New York Times in November of 1948, Bogie came up with a “cure” for the gangster film.

  Noting that he was a filmmaker and a man who was about to become a father, he said that he had a special interest in the problem. The “problem” which seemed to be emerging from all these antigangster film discussions was that the public wa
s fascinated by the gangsters, not the police. “The reason for the gangster’s popularity,” Bogie said, “is that we don’t hunt him singly or on equal terms. We call out a horde of squad cars, the National Guard, or the entire FBI and, after hunting him down like a rabbit, fill him so full of lead even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. Or, if we don’t, for the average American the rest of the story stops moving until the gangster has by some good fortune or some charming device on the writer’s part, got away and who in the audience at this point is going to say to himself, ‘I like those policemen’?

  “The young gangster, running out into the street, or up some alley, spraying the world he hates with bullets, may not be as morally acceptable as the young Crazy Horse outwitting an American army on the march, but as a dramatic device he will catch the same amount of sympathy, killer though he is.

  “The cure for the gangster film, then, seems eminently simple to me. In The Maltese Falcon we sent a single individual out against a lot of gangsters, and the result was a whole series of pictures with the lone hero against gangsters instead of vice-versa. We called him Sam Spade, but you could call him Calvin Coolidge and still get the same effect if you held to the rule. Of course, I don’t claim we’re changing basic values. You have the cavalry for you winning money instead of the Indians, but you are going to get some killings in any event.”

  What I find admirable in my father on this censorship issue was not that he was against censorship, as I am, but that he was able to understand the other side, and not just paint one side of the question all black and the other all white. This, to me, is the mark of an intelligent person.

  I suspect that, politically, I am much more like my father than my mother. I think of my mother as a kind of knee-jerk liberal, though it drives her crazy when I say that. I tend to be liberal on some issues, like abortion and civil rights. But I’m also conservative on others. For example, I believe in the death penalty, which horrifies my mother.