Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  The Bogart sisters were not at home. Hump dressed himself formally, as requested by Maud. He eagerly awaited his introduction to both men, even though he wasn’t quite sure who they were. Maud had talked at length about their status as “literary lions.”

  Dreiser was the first to enter the house, firmly shaking Hump’s hand. “My, oh my,” he said, “how that baby did grow. They’re still publishing Maud’s portrait of you as an adorable baby, though. You’re easily as famous as the Arrow Collar Man or the Schweppes Commander.”

  Dreiser had not yet written his masterpiece, An American Tragedy which wasn’t penned until 1925, but Sister Carrie, written in 1900 when Hump was one year old, had already been broadly distributed throughout the country. Dreiser had brought an autographed copy as a gift for the boy. “Maud claims you read one novel a week. Try mine. I must warn you, though. Even my publisher tried to suppress this book.”

  With perfect manners, Hump accepted it with genuine gratitude. It would be the first of many autographed books that writers would present to him as tokens of their esteem. They’d eventually include men as diverse as Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote.

  At that point, H.L. Mencken arrived, with Maud on his arm, both of them having overheard the friendly exchange between Hump and Dreiser. Bombastically turning to Dreiser, Mencken said, “Your publisher didn’t want to suppress Sister Carrie because it was racy; he wanted to suppress it because its style is so weak. There are lines in that novel that simply don’t work, like ‘he worked in a truly swell saloon.’ Calling a saloon ‘truly swell’ sounds inarticulate and unsavvy, and sometimes I wonder how you got away with it. I could go on and on, citing other examples.”

  Averting his gaze from Dreiser’s angry eyes, Mencken extended his hand to Hump. “Hello, I’m H. L. Mencken.” Hump stammered his hellos.

  Ignoring Mencken, Dreiser returned to his dialogue with Hump. “Please overlook the occasional unevenness in my style. I’m interested in bigger game, especially the expression of broader ideas. I write as a means of proving that history does not dominate a man, but that it’s actually an expression of mankind at its most creative. It is man who creates history, not history that creates men.”

  Taking off his coat, Mencken acerbically shot back. “Is that what we do?” he asked Dreiser. He turned back to Hump. “Be careful—reading Sister Carrie will stunt your growth.”

  Smiling grimly at the insults, but holding his tongue, Dreiser got up, supposedly to pee. Maud showed him down the corridor to the toilet. Mencken sat down next to Hump on the sofa. “It was my reading of Huckleberry Finn at the age of nine that changed my life. It was, in fact, the most stupendous awakening of my entire life. It turned me into a bookworm and eventually a writer. Do you want to be a writer?”

  “Father wants me to study medicine and follow in his footsteps.”

  “Become anything but a shyster lawyer,” Mencken said. “I detest lawyers, especially Jewish lawyers. They are the worst.”

  Hump silently noted that Mencken shared Maud’s anti-Semitism.

  “After you’ve read the important books, go out and learn from life itself, taking all the worldly wisdom you can glean from the saloon keeper, the cop on the block, even the midwife, or especially the midwife if she performs a few abortions on the side. I figured being a newspaper reporter was the best way to meet people from all walks of life. After my first story, a five-line report about a horse thief, was published in the Baltimore Morning Herald, I was committed to journalism from that day forward.”

  At that point, Maud came back into the living room with Dreiser, who looked over at Mencken. “Why don’t you move to New York and leave that hick town of Baltimore behind you?”

  “New York is but a third-rate Babylon,” Mencken said. “I prefer the frowzier charms of Baltimore. Even that immense protein factory known as Chesapeake Bay.”

  Dreiser had to excuse himself again to go up to Maud’s studio to look over some of her latest sketches.

  Humphrey chose that moment to invite Mencken up on the roof to look at his pigeon coop. “Maud finds these birds disgusting and unsanitary. When I came down with pneumonia, she blamed the pigeons.”

  Mencken didn’t much like pigeons either. But he was entranced with the view of the New York skyline from the Bogart roof. The bracing air delighted him, and seemed to spark some crazed ambition within him. Hump suspected that he’d had a few whiskies before arriving at the Bogart house.

  Mencken waved his arms in the air and seemed to be speaking to the world at large, and not specifically to Hump. “I want to be the native American Voltaire,” Mencken said. “I see myself as the enemy of all Puritans.& I will become a heretic within academia—a one-man demolition crew of Victorian morality.”

  Later, Maud called them for tea in her little garden in back, although Hump suspected that both of these men would have preferred whiskey.

  Over tea, Mencken continued to lecture Dreiser, albeit more diplomatically. “There is only one way to make money publishing books. You can write about only four subjects. First, murder stories. Second, novels in which the beautiful heroine is forcibly overcome by the handsome hero. Third, books about spiritualism, occultism and such claptrap. Fourth, any book devoted to Abraham Lincoln.”

  “Speaking of Lincoln,” Dreiser said, “Someone recently submitted an essay for publication in my magazine. It’s written by Theodore Ward, a historian, and based on extensive research. It’s an exposé of the sex life of Abraham Lincoln, but I fear I cannot publish it, although it’s a hell of an interesting article.”

  “Is it too controversial?” Maud asked.

  “That it is,” Dreiser said. “It maintains that Lincoln was a homosexual and had a five-year love affair with another man.”

  “I don’t think that article will ever be published,” Maud said.

  “Maybe in fifty years the public will be ready for it,” Mencken said.

  As Maud was pouring tea for Dreiser, a large butterfly flew from a flower bush, winging by her head. Dropping her tea pot, she screamed as if ten rapists had surrounded her. She ran into the living room and up the steps leading to her studio.

  Both Dreiser and Mencken looked to Hump for some explanation of this erratic behavior.

  “All her life she’s been terrified of butterflies,” Hump said.

  ***

  It wasn’t only Dreiser and Mencken who wanted to meet the Maud Humphrey Baby. The stigma of having posed for that illustration followed Hump throughout of his school days. He’d been mocked and ridiculed when he’d entered Delancy School, which he’d attended to the fifth grade. He still hadn’t shaken the curse when, at the age of thirteen, he enrolled in Trinity School, which was housed in a sandstone building at 91st Street between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues. An Episcopal institutional “for the training of young gentlemen,” it was the oldest continuously operating school in the country.

  Doug Storer, a classmate, recalled that virtually every day after school, a gang of bullies waited for Hump, calling him “sissy” or chanting, “rock-a-bye baby.”

  The confrontation sometimes led to Hump arriving home with a bloody lip and, on more than one occasion, a black eye.

  At school, Hump had turned out to be a poor student, excelling in nothing, and with particularly low marks in German. Since Belmont, a classically educated descendant of the original Dutch burghers of New York, spoke fluent German, he had demanded that his son learn the language too.

  Hump’s grades in other classes were almost as bad. As the months went by, it became apparent to Belmont and Maud that their son would not follow in his father’s footsteps as a surgeon.

  “He’ll be lucky if he graduates from high school,” Belmont told Maud. To compound matters, Hump developed scarlet fever and had to repeat the eleventh grade.

  Although Belmont had been a notable athlete, Hump did not willingly participate in organized sports unless he was forced to as part of the school curriculum. He told classmate Storer that he e
specially disliked wrestling. “I loathe such close contact with other guys. There’s one fucking guy who gets a hard-on every time he pins me down on the mat. I can feel the God damn thing pressing up against me.”

  Storer remembers that there was a debate among some of the girls over whether Hump was “handsome” or “just good looking.” His classmate recalls that, “His appearance was always neat. I never saw him when he wasn’t well-groomed. He had a slim figure with very dark eyes and jet-black hair that was always plastered down to his head with some kind of cream. He showed up every day in a dark blue wool serge suit with a vest and a stiffly starched white shirt with detachable collars held on by gold-plated brass buttons. His black shoes were always highly polished. His ties were never garish but always in some somber color like navy blue or berry brown, the stuff bankers wore at the time.”

  In winter he’d appear in a Chesterfield overcoat with a velvet collar.

  The author, Eric Hodgins, remembers that “Bogart always wore a black derby hat, rain or shine. It set him apart from the other boys. Many a time he would get that hat knocked off his head. But he always picked it up, dusted it off, put it back on his head, and went on his way.”

  Hump told Storer that he didn’t want to get out of bed sometimes, knowing that at three o’clock that afternoon a gang was waiting to taunt him. He was not a fighter and had never taken on one of the neighborhood toughs in combat. If Hump defended himself at all, it was to raise his hands to protect his face.

  One cold January afternoon, the toughest guy on the block plowed his steel-knuckled fist into Hump’s face, breaking his nose. He’d run all the way to his father’s office at 245 West 103rd Street. The office on the second floor of the family brownstone was covered in a thick moss green carpet with beautiful mahogany paneling rescued from a townhouse in Chelsea which had been demolished. It was one of the few houses in the neighborhood that had a telephone, a necessity because Hump’s father was a doctor. Belmont had tended to his son’s nose, making emergency repairs before taking him to the hospital. All the way to the clinic, Belmont had chided Hump for not defending himself better. “When I was your age, I could beat up any boy in my home-town. Maud’s making a sissy of you. I hate the name Humphrey she gave you. That’s a sissy name.”

  Even as Hump had moved into his teenage years, Maud had continued to dictate his dress. At formal school dances, she’d demanded that he wear white kid gloves and black patent leather pumps. “I was like a God damn teenage dandy,” Bogie later told his favorite director, John Huston.

  ***

  One afternoon Maud called her teenage son into her studio and revealed to him some of the male nudes that she’d painted in Paris. He was shocked because until then, he had known only her scenes of Victorian innocence.

  For reasons not known to him at the time, she’d tried to explain to him when male nudity was acceptable and when it was not.

  “When a man is nude and aroused, and is showing himself off, that is not acceptable,” she informed her son. “But when a man in a flaccid state is posing nude for an art class, that is acceptable. The men and women painting him have no actual interest in his sex. They view the body as a whole, as an object from which they can make an artistic statement. It’s the same when your father sees a nude man or woman in his office. He has them strip to examine them in detail. But as a doctor, he has the same disinterest in the nude body that an artist does while painting a nude in his studio. This is called sexless nudity.”

  After that rather detailed and pedantic explanation, Maud invited Hump to accompany her that afternoon to her art classes.

  At the Artists and Models Studio on Manhattan’s West 28th Street, Maud had been temporarily teaching classes to young illustrators who wanted to become working commercial artists like herself. Since she was widely known as a Victorian illustrator portraying an idealized fantasy life of home and hearth, she’d been an odd choice to teach classes with nude models, although her background in Paris had prepared her for such an assignment.

  When she arrived with Hump at the studio, she still hadn’t told him why he was here. It turned out that Maud had been filling in during a sick leave of Duane Edwards, the regular teacher. To an increasing degree, Maud had been leaving the house on mysterious errands. Hump had heard her talking over the phone several times with someone named “Duane,” and he’d suspected that Maud was having an affair now that she was no longer sleeping in the same bed with his father.

  In a back dressing room, Maud told her son, “Remember what I said about nude modeling. There is nothing about the nude male body that we have to be ashamed of. Our regular model is not here today. He’s just a young boy who models for classes. The class has painted mature models, both female and male, in the nude. This week we are painting young boys. I want you to model nude and fill in for our regular model who is sick.”

  Horrified at his mother’s suggestion, Hump wanted to bolt from the building. Except for a medical examination, he’d never pulled off his clothes before anyone, and certainly not in front of women. Since he had no real basis for comparisons, and hadn’t seen any pictures, he had not been certain just how he measured up with other boys his age.

  He’d always been curious about other male genitalia, but when he’d been at a latrine with other boys, he’d always looked away, afraid to be caught gazing at them. He’d feared that because of his reputation as a sissy, all he would need was to be spotted glancing at the genitals of other boys. He’d never showered with other boys and had never seen his father in the nude either.

  When he revolted at the idea of the posing session, Maud taunted him. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid to take off your clothes in front of artists. Are you ashamed of the way you’re developed? You don’t have to be.”

  As he looked at her, he began to think that he hated her. Defiantly, he began to peel off his clothes. Before he’d taken his trousers down, she turned and walked away.

  A school custodian came into his dressing room, finding Hump standing there looking pathetically naked. He handed him a white robe, telling him to wear it out into the studio. “When you go up on the platform in front of the class, drop your robe and sit naturally on the stool I put there.”

  Years later, Bogie recalled how he’d come into the studio so embarrassed that he didn’t dare look at anybody. He was red-faced but he did as he was told and dropped his robe, going at once to a large stool in the center of the platform. There he had braced himself for a long sketching session, crossing his legs.

  The custodian came out and pried his legs apart, exposing Hump’s genitalia to the painters. His heart was beating so fiercely at that point& that Hump didn’t much care what happened next. His only thought was that Maud was there, along with the others, looking at her son in all his shame.

  As the artists painted, Hump tried to think of anything except what was actually happening in the studio.

  The session ended exactly at noon. Hump put on his robe and retreated to the rear where the custodian brought roast beef sandwiches for the artists. He’d offered one to Hump. Because he was hungry, he accepted, only wishing that it had been a ham sandwich.

  Maud remained in the studio evaluating the nude drawings of her son. At one o’clock, Hump was summoned back to the platform. The second time wasn’t as traumatic for him. He still refused to make eye contact with any of the painters in the room, not even knowing whether they were men or women.

  He was called back for a final session at three o’clock, and at exactly four o’clock, the day’s work ended.

  Fully dressed, he waited outside on the street for Maud. When she appeared, he was embarrassed to look into her face. “Now that wasn’t so bad,” she said. “You’re to come back with me four more days this week. The good news is that you’re going to get fifty dollars for your work. Imagine that. Fifty dollars, the most money you’ve ever seen at one time in your life.”

  She told him that he’d have to go home alone, as she had to visit a sick frien
d. She was obviously going to meet her new friend, Duane.

  Hump stood watching Maud go up the street to her next rendezvous. A militant suffragette, she passed out pamphlets as she made her way along the crowded boulevard, calling on passers-by to give the vote to the women of America.

  ***

  His parents’ names had appeared regularly in Dau’s New York Blue Book since 1907, but Belmont constantly attacked his wife for “trying to climb the social ladder.” The son of a saloon keeper, he couldn’t care less about the opinions of New York society.

  Every night at their New York home, their arguments were virtually the same. “When you’re not social climbing, you’re driven by your career like some God damn maniac,” he’d shout at her when drunk.

  Matching him drink for drink, Maud always stood up to him. She constantly reminded him that her profession brought in more than twice as much money as his did.

  She claimed that she was known among the very upper crust of New York society, and enjoyed a national reputation as an illustrator, whereas he “consorted with river rats.”

  Instead of accepting invitations into some of the finest homes of New York, Belmont preferred the company of saloon keepers, mechanics, janitors, and truck drivers. He’d frequent the taverns of blue-collar laborers, preferring those saloons along New York’s waterfront where he’d find “men of the sea.” If he’d had enough to drink, he’d invite sailors back to his home to spend a night or even a weekend.

  That had led to some of Maud’s most brutal fights with her husband. “These bums aren’t coming into my living room,” she’d shout at her husband in front of the Bogart children. She’d demand that the doctor take his newly acquired sailor friend up to the fourth-floor bedroom, which was usually assigned to a servant. “You can sleep up there with him,” she’d said. “Don’t come to my bed tonight.”