Over the years my father never raised much fuss about critics. He said, “I always thought they were fair, except for one, who wrote that so and so was bad in the part, but not as bad as Humphrey Bogart would have been if he had played it.”
Dad appeared in dozens of plays during the 1920s, and in time his reviews got better, except perhaps from his mother, Maud, who made it clear that actors were not socially acceptable.
During this time my father drank lots of alcohol and dated lots of girls. Though it later became common for people to talk about my father as a man who had sex appeal without being handsome, the fact is that he was considered quite handsome then, and was even compared to Valentino in some reviews.
Though Bogie had not always had good reviews he had always tried hard. He was, and remained for all of his life, a student of acting.
One early story is that when Bogie was dating Mary Philips, who later became his second wife, he met an actor by the name of Holbrook Blinn, a stage star of the time.
“Hey, you’re no taller than me,” Bogie said to Blinn.
“So.”
“But I’ve seen you on the stage. You always look taller.”
“Watch,” Blinn said. He turned around and took several steps away from Bogie. Then he paused for a few seconds and slowly turned back. Bogie was astonished. It seemed to him that Blinn had grown an inch or two right in front of him.
“How on earth?” Bogie said.
“Just think tall,” Blinn said. “Just think tall.”
From the beginning, it seems, he understood drama, and often during his life he would articulate on the subject.
Though his early parts were as juveniles, he sometimes called them “Tennis, anyone?” parts and that is why he is given credit for bringing that phrase into the language. He explained juveniles this way:
“The playwright gets five or six characters into a scene and doesn’t know how to get them offstage. So what does he do? He drags in the juvenile, who has been waiting in the wings for just such a chance. He comes in, tennis racquet under his arm, and says, ‘Tennis, anyone?’ That, of course, solves the playwright’s problem. The player whom the author wants to get rid of for the time being accepts the suggestion. The leading lady, who is due for a love scene with the leading man, declines. So the others exit and all is ready for the love scene between the leading lady and man. It doesn’t always have to be tennis. Sometimes it’s golf or riding, but tennis is better because it gives the young man a chance to look attractive in spotless white flannels.”
My father had at least a couple of flirtations with the film industry before he made it in Hollywood. In 1930 the studios were looking for actors who could talk, so he went out to Hollywood. But so did a lot of others. Nate Benchley says, “Probably at no other time has so little talent been concentrated in one place.”
He got into some pictures. They were boring and he was boring in them. So, fed up with Hollywood, he came back to the New York stage.
In 1934 he was in Invitation to a Murder, a play that was described by one critic as “high-voltage trash.” But producer-director Arthur Hopkins saw it and wanted Bogie for the role in The Petrified Forest.
Whatever magical quality my father had seems to have shown up for the first time on January 7, 1935, in that play. He was thirty-five years old. What he had was that elusive something we call “star quality.”
What is star quality? Nobody is quite sure, but Bogie, apparently, recognized it in himself. Sam Jaffe told me, “I was talking once to a director about this. He said there are some good actors, who you don’t really notice when they come on the screen. But he said that when Bogie comes on the screen, no matter who else is there, your eye is drawn to Bogart. That’s what makes a star. And this is something that Bogie knew about himself. He said to me, ‘You know, Sam, I’m not the greatest actor in the world. Gary Cooper is not a great actor. But when he comes on the screen you watch him. And I have that quality. It’s God given. That’s what they call a star.’”
While Bogie might have slighted his own acting ability in that conversation, there were other times when Bogie told people that he was the second best actor in Hollywood, and Spencer Tracy was the first.
On this subject of star quality, John Huston said, “Bogie was a medium-sized man, not particularly impressive offscreen, but something happened when he was playing the right part. Those lights and shadows composed themselves into another, nobler personality; heroic, as in High Sierra. I swear the camera has a way of looking into a person and perceiving things that the naked eye doesn’t register.”
As Bogie developed his craft he became a teacher to others, just as Blinn had been to him.
In 1944, for example, when he was making Passage to Marseilles, there was a scene where the cabin boy, played by Billy Roy, had to throw an orange. Every time Billy threw the piece of fruit he heard nothing but complaints.
“You’re throwing it like a girl,” the director said. “Throw it like a boy.”
Billy kept trying, but he couldn’t seem to throw the orange the way he was supposed to. Soon everybody in the crew was getting on him, and Billy was close to tears. It was my father who finally said, “Enough!”
He led Billy off to the side and took the time to teach him how to throw the orange. When Billy had it perfect they started shooting again.
Once when I was a kid my father brought six young actors over to the house to talk about acting. Frank Sinatra was there, too. All of the young actors were unknown at the time, but two of them made the cut, so to speak. One of them was Tom Laughlin, who later starred in the Billy Jack films. Another was Dennis Hopper.
Bogie sat on the floor, and the young actors, sitting cross-legged on the floor, gathered around him. “Keep working. Never be ‘available,’” he told them. This was advice he had been given long ago, and he quoted it often. “Keep playing in theater or TV, anywhere, as often as you can. Eventually, if you’re any good, somebody will see you. Of course the best way to get into the picture business is to go on the stage first.”
“Why do you keep working, now that you’re such a big star?” one of the young actresses asked.
“I don’t know,” Bogie said. “I have a charming wife, two beautiful kids, a gorgeous home, and a yacht. But I’ll be damned if I know why I work so hard. Sinatra and I were talking about it the other day. Working is therapy, I guess. It keeps us on the wagon. This is a very bad town to be out of work in. After a week or so of not working you’re so bored you don’t know what the hell to do.”
Bogart also told the young people, “If you want to be an actor be honest with yourself. Don’t let them push you around. When you believe in something, you fight for it even though you may suffer for it. We actors are better judges than any studio as to what is good for us. As soon as your name gets known and you feel you can say, ‘I won’t do this,’ if you think the part isn’t right, go ahead, say it. In the long run it will pay off. Just remember to put some dough aside for the times you’re suspended.”
Dad asked Dennis Hopper why he wanted to be an actor.
“It’s a lot of things,” Hopper said. “To do something in life, to be somebody.”
“But why acting?” my father asked. “Why not farming? Or something else?”
“I’m just best suited for acting,” Hopper said. “I want, I don’t know, I just have the urge to be better than—”
“Yes, all right, go on,” my father said.
“To be better than the other guy,” Hopper said.
“To get out of the millions?”
“Yes,” Hopper said, “that’s it.”
My father smiled. “You’re okay, kid,” he said. He said “kid” a lot.
“Enjoy the applause,” he told the actors. “It’s wonderful. It has nothing to do with vanity. It’s the satisfaction, like telling a joke and having everybody laugh.”
And he told them, “Don’t go to parties to meet people.”
On the subject of publicity he said,
“A star has to accept a certain invasion of privacy. If you get loaded in a bar, then you can’t get mad if it’s printed.”
“What do you think a star is?” one of the women asked.
“Good stories make stars,” Bogie said. “But if you want to be an actress, don’t say, ‘I want to be a star.’ Just concentrate on acting, learn your trade. You’ve got to develop confidence if you’re to play a scene right, and confidence comes from knowing the ropes. Personally, I think you’re all in a hell of a mess, wanting to be actors, because they don’t know what acting is in Hollywood. They think it’s easy to act. They think actors are a necessary evil.”
My father had some very definite ideas about acting and actors. He was skeptical about actors with a message. “If an actor has got a message he should call Western Union,” Bogie said. “An actor’s job is to act, nothing more. He owes the public nothing but a good performance.”
Sam Jaffe told me, “Your father was not impressed with method actors. I remember being on the set with Bogart in one film and he was working with a young, so-called method actor. Bogie said to me, ‘Sam, watch this guy. He thinks he’s going to steal the scene from me.’ So they started a new take and the other actor made a lot of noise and moved his body and his hands a lot. But when the rushes were shown it was Bogart who caught the eye. There was no way you could steal a scene from Bogie. He said he had two rules for playing with method actors. One was to let them improvise as much as they wanted, and the other was never to play an eating scene with them because they spit all over you.”
My father once asked a young actor about the Stanislavski method.
“Well, Stanislavski claimed that the real interpretation comes from the subconscious,” the young actor explained. “We can’t touch it or control it, but if we release it, it will flow from the subconscious.”
Bogie probably thought this was so much horse manure, but he replied politely. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” he said, “you’ve got me completely screwed up. But I know this, the audience is always a little ahead of you. If a guy points a gun at you the audience knows you’re afraid. You don’t have to make faces. You just have to believe you are the person.”
Bogie said that the key to good acting was concentration. You might recall that first shot of Rick in Casablanca shows him playing chess alone. This was my father’s idea, because playing chess alone was something he did often, and he associated it with his acting. He believed that his concentration at chess was what he needed in his acting.
While Bogie believed in talent and concentration, I suspect he would agree with Woody Allen, who once said that eighty percent of life is just showing up. Bogie was a guy who always showed up for work.
“Bogie was a man who was very disciplined,” Sam Jaffe says. “People come to me and they often bring up the fact that he drank while he worked in a picture, and I say, you got the wrong man. Bogie came to work with a lunch pail. In it he had one bottle of cold beer. At lunch time he would go to his bungalow or his trailer and he would eat his lunch and have his beer. And he timed it. One half hour. Then he would lie down and go right to sleep for the other half hour. Bogie was anything but a drinker when he worked in pictures. He was completely sober because he was a man who came out of the theater and his acting and his art was something he revered and respected. He came to work like any disciplined worker and he knew his lines. He really liked what he was doing. But people used to say he was a drunkard. It’s true he got in fights and drank when he was not working, but not on the set.”
This is something that everybody says about my father. He was never late, always knew his lines, and would rehearse for as long as necessary for the other actors so that they didn’t have to talk to a wall. In fact, one beef my father had with Sinatra, even though they were close friends, was that he felt Frank was not a professional as an actor, though he certainly was as a singer. Bogie felt that Sinatra treated acting too lightly. During the later years of his life, Bogie would be in bed by ten o’clock when he had to work the next day, and he often chided Sinatra for being such a carouser during the making of a film.
Actually, there is one recorded time of my father letting booze interfere with his work at Warner Brothers. He got drunk one night and the next morning refused to work. Instead, he zoomed around the Warner Brothers lot on his bicycle, shouting, “Look, no hands, no hands,” like a ten-year-old who had learned a new trick.
Finally, Jack Warner came out to talk to him.
“Bogie, what the hell are you doing?”
“Riding my bicycle,” Bogie said.
“It’s time to go to work,” Warner said.
“I don’t feel like working.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“That’s right, I don’t.”
“Well,” Warner said, “there’s a lot of people in there who do feel like working and they get paychecks that are less than what you spend on scotch.”
“So,” Bogie said. “What’s your point?”
“My point is that these people are depending on you. If you don’t work, they don’t work.”
That pretty much ended that conversation. Bogie put his bike away and went to work, and never showed up drunk again.
Though Bogie was disciplined about acting, he claimed not to be sentimental about it.
“I take my work seriously,” he said, “but none of this art for art’s sake. Any art or any job of work that’s any good at all sells. If it’s worth selling, it’s worth buying. I have no sentimentality about such matters. If someone offers me five dollars a year more than I’m getting I take it.”
Sounds nice, but it simply is not true. Bogie also said, “The only reason to make a million dollars is so you can tell some fat producer to go to hell.” And the fact is that Bogie, who was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood in the late 1940s, often gave up a great deal of money in order to play the roles he really wanted.
“Your father was an intellectual, for an actor,” Phil Gersh says. “Generally, actors aren’t very smart. But he was very well read. One time he came to my office and he said, ‘Phillip, have you read this book, The Caine Mutiny?
“I said yes.
“‘And do you know Stanley Kramer?’ he said. Stanley was going to direct The Caine Mutiny.
“I said, ‘Yes, I know Stanley very well.’
“And your father said, ‘Well, I’d like to play Captain Queeg.’
“So I called Stanley and he said he thought Bogie would be great as Queeg, and I called Harry Cohn, who was head of Columbia. Now, at that time the top salary for a big star was about $200,000 per picture. So I told Cohn that’s what we’re looking for and Cohn says, ‘No, no, he wants to play this part, we’ll pay him $75,000.’ And Bogie ended up doing the movie for a lot less money than he could have gotten for another film. Every studio in town knew they could get Bogart for cheap if he really wanted a part.”
Bogie must have had good instincts about Queeg, because the role earned him his fourth Oscar nomination. Marlon Brando beat him out that year, for On the Waterfront.
But Bogie’s instincts were not always so good about films. He made some bad ones, and he knew it. When he was in Italy with Huston making Beat the Devil, for example, he sensed that the film was in trouble. He thought the first script was a dog and that maybe he and Huston should drop the whole thing. Instead, Huston brought Truman Capote over to rewrite. Capote turned what had been a complicated adventure into a parody, but not all of the actors knew that. The result was a dopey, oddball movie that was supposed to be a spoof of caper movies, but just did not meet with everybody’s taste. When the movie came out it was a financial failure. In fact, one theater placed an ad apologizing for showing the film, but, noting that they were obliged to run it a few more days, offered to give the admission price back to anybody who thought it was as lousy as they, apparently, did.
Critically, the film was given good marks and bad. One reviewer said that no matter where you came in during the movie you felt as
if you had missed half of it. Dad, it seems, agreed that Beat the Devil was a disaster, and he said that the people who thought it was funny were phony intellectuals.
Beat the Devil would later have a cult following, but that doesn’t make it a good film. Many Bogie films have cult followings and many of them are bad. The Big Sleep, for example, has many devoted fans, and the movie is great fun, but is also a confused mess. Bosley Crowther says, “So many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused.” And when my father was asked what happened to the chauffeur in the movie, he replied, “I’m damned if I know.”
Though my father made a lot of money as an actor, and did not spend it foolishly, he was not a man who accumulated great wealth from investments. At one time he owned a few Safeway supermarkets, but they went to Mayo Methot when he divorced her, as did a large chunk of cash. His only other significant investments were in movies, and he tended to make these investments more with his heart than his head. He had put some of his own money into Beat the Devil, probably as an act of faith in his friend John Huston.
But that was not his last movie investment. Throughout his career, my father was often concerned about the quality of movies he appeared in. In 1947, he decided to put his money where his mouth was, and he formed his own production company, Santana Pictures Corporation, with the help of Sam Jaffe and Sam’s partner, Mary Baker. Bogie said that some day all big stars would have their own production companies, so they could acquire properties and control what films they appeared in. This was a bizarre idea at the time. Jack Warner, of course, was pissed off. He called Sam Jaffe.
“Sam,” he said, “you are the most destructive force in the movie industry today.”
“Why is that, Jack?” Sam asked.
“You have made an actor into an independent company,” Warner said. “That sets a terrible, terrible precedent.”
Sam asked, “How does that hurt the industry? Bogie is a name above the title and he wants his own company.”
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