Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Hump was amazed that a teenager even younger than himself had had so many exploits with women. Hump always remembered his introduction to Stuart as “one of the most memorable evenings of my life. With Bill I felt like I was a boy talking to another boy. With Stuart, I felt we were talking man to man. My blossoming friendship with him became a rite of passage into manhood.”

  When Bill called the next day to invite Hump to a Broadway play, Hump had to turn him down. He’d already accepted an invitation for horseback riding with Stuart, who had a lot of free time because Alice “was shooting some stupid movie during the day and appearing as Meg in Little Women at night.”

  Bill seemed disappointed that Hump had made a “new best friend” so suddenly. Nonetheless, to show what a good sport he was, he invited both Stuart and Hump to a Broadway musical to which his father had given him free tickets. But during the performance, Bill felt a little left out and neglected, as Hump devoted all his attention to Stuart, exaggerating his hell-raising exploits at Andover and his conquests of campus beauties.

  Shortly before Stuart had to report back to military service, he came to the Bogart home to retrieve Hump for another afternoon of horseback riding.

  Frances (Pat) Bogart was in the living room, and Hump introduced the good-looking Army man to his sister. Frances was almost the same height as her brother and had a shapely figure even then. When Stuart learned that she didn’t have an escort for the school dance the following night, he volunteered his services.

  Stuart was so captivated with Frances that he asked Hump if he could postpone their horseback ride for another time. He invited Frances to go for a stroll with him in Central Park.

  After Hump returned to Andover, Frances wrote to him from St. Mary’s School in Peekskill, New York. She informed him that she received a letter from Stuart almost every day. Hump wrote several letters to Stuart himself, but only a brief postcard every now and then came in reply.

  Before his departure for Phillips Academy, he hadn’t even bothered to call Bill to tell him good-bye and to thank him for his hospitality. But confronted anew with the loneliness of Andover, Hump started writing Bill again. Hump’s temporarily deserted friend responded with enthusiastic letters, and their friendship resumed with only slightly less intensity than before.

  ***

  After his third week back at Andover, Hump’s dormitory maniacally celebrated the end of a winning football game. Even the stern headmaster, Boyce, temporarily relaxed his iron-fisted rules and allowed the young men to celebrate the school’s victory. Having no interest in sports, Hump had stayed in his room trying to study, hoping for some passing grades.

  Some of the men on Hump’s floor had slipped beer upstairs and were having a wild party, running up and down the corridor. When this party overflowed into the shower room, it appeared that some of the men were pouring beer over the heads of the others, as they showered.

  Anxious to see what was going on, Hump turned off the lamp in his room, removed the antique map, and peered through the hole in the wall at the naked boys in the shower.

  That was a big mistake. Somehow Charles Yardley Chittick, even without his horn-rimmed glasses, happened to notice a hole in the wall to the shower room. He detected someone spying on them.

  Poking his fingers through the hole in the wall, Chittick encountered the framed map, which had fallen back into position as Hump had jumped back. The wire holding the map came unhooked, the print falling to the floor, its glass frame breaking. Terrified at having been caught peeking, Hump concealed himself in the corner of the darkened room.

  “We’ve got a live one, guys,” Chittick yelled to the other boys. “Bogart’s spying on our dicks.”

  As Hump cringed in his darkened room, he heard catcalls and cries of “Sissy, sissy.” One of the young men shouted inside the hole, “Look at mine if you want to see a big dick. I’ll let you be my gal, Nancy boy.”

  The next day, humiliated, Hump darted in and out of his classes, hoping not to encounter any of his dorm mates. When he returned to his dormitory, Boyce was waiting for him and asked him to step inside the library. There Boyce appeared to be under reasonable control but his eyes avoided Hump’s when he spoke. “Many young men go through certain periods of adjustment in their lives,” Boyce said, like a professor giving a physics lecture. “These are natural things. It doesn’t mean that these same boys can’t grow up to become responsible citizens and loving fathers with a good wife and healthy children. I think you’ll grow out of your present behavior. It will take time, though. In the meantime, you’re confined to your room after classes let out for the day. You’re to leave this building only to go to the dining hall. As for your new room assignment, there is a small one right next to my apartment. It used to belong to a janitor who worked here. You’re to take that room. I’ve had your stuff moved downstairs. Your room upstairs will be assigned to someone else next term. Needless to say, that hole carved in the wall will be sealed up. I’ll write Dr. Bogart and bill him for damages. To spare you, I won’t tell him why you damaged the wall.”

  “But I didn’t…” Hump stammered in protest but soon realized that it was useless. He’d already been tried and convicted.

  After the shower incident, the other young men in Hump’s dormitory avoided him, all except one, Floyd Furlow. Catching up with Hump after class one day, Floyd told him that he didn’t believe all the stories being spread. “If anyone’s a fucking sissy, it’s Chittick himself. I wouldn’t take a shower with him.”

  Over a cup of coffee and a hamburger at a local café, Floyd told Hump that the only way he could salvage his reputation at the Phillips Academy was to have an affair. “I’ve been seeing this older woman regularly. Her name’s Medora Falkenstein, and she loves young men. She even likes to do nude drawings of them. I can set up a meeting. When the guys learn you’re seeing Medora, they’ll forget all about Chittick’s dumb gossip.”

  At first Hump had raised a number of protests, including that he was confined to his room after class. “I’m not even supposed to be here right now,” Hump said, looking around the café. “I’ll tell Boyce I was studying at the library.”

  “The Boyce family is sound asleep by ten o’clock every night,” Floyd said. “All the guys know that. Your new room is on the ground floor. All you have to do is open your window and slip out after the Boyces are snoring.”

  Slipping out the next night, Hump was shaking a bit as he knocked on the door of Medora Falkenstein. He was a bit disappointed when she answered the door. A shade past forty, she was garishly made up and wore an artist’s smock. He wasn’t certain what her body looked like under that ill-fitting garment. But even if he wasn’t immediately smitten with her, Medora was enthralled with Hump.

  She invited him in and gave him a large glass of Scotch. She also filled him with compliments about “what a beauty you are, far more so than Floyd, although I love that boy dearly.”

  Hump later told Floyd that he fully expected to get laid that afternoon, and had wanted to get it over with, so he could slip back into the dormitory, letting Floyd spread the word the next day of his conquest.

  Medora had her own ideas about sex and how she liked it. On his third drink, when Hump’s head was reeling, she showed him nude sketches she’d done of several boys on the campus, especially three of Floyd himself. She claimed that she’d moved to Andover just to be close to campus and “its never-ending supply of good-looking men.”

  “Who buys this stuff?” Hump asked her.

  “I deal exclusively with a private art dealer in Boston,” she said. “He has clients all over the country.”

  “You mean women buy this?” Hump asked.

  “Heavens no,” she said. “Men who like to be discreet. They pay top prices to see nude sketches of some of the country’s most beautiful young men in their prime. Perhaps you’ll pose for me one day.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Hump said, no doubt thinking of the time he’d posed nude for Maud’s art class.
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  “There’s a hundred dollars in it for you,” she said.

  He was amazed at being offered that amount of money. It sounded like a fantastic sum. “I’ll think about it.”

  “You don’t have something you’re ashamed of?” Medora asked, reaching to unbutton Hump’s fly. With deft fingers, she removed his penis. “My, oh my, what a big boy you are. Much bigger than Floyd and he’s not bad.” Before Hump truly comprehended what was happening, Medora skinned back the cap of his penis and descended on him, as he immediately hardened.

  In later life Bogie would tell friends that Medora got him addicted to blow-jobs. “She was the first person who ever gave me one, and she was also the best. A suction pump. She never allowed herself to be penetrated so she had developed her technique of the blow-job to absolute perfection since that was her only thing.” Medora would masturbate herself as she performed fellatio on young men from Phillips Academy who ventured into her studio.

  Afternoon visits to Medora became a ritual for Hump, who would go and see her right after his last class of the day. He managed to convince Boyce that he was spending the time in the academy library.

  Eventually, since she always plied him with “hooch,” as she called it, she didn’t have much trouble persuading Hump to pose nude for her. After all, he didn’t have anything to hide from her prying eyes that she hadn’t seen in intimate close-up. Even buck-naked, he was completely relaxed in her studio, unlike his time in front of Maud’s class when he’d been so nervous that he felt he’d shrunk a lot.

  That was not his problem with Medora. Sometimes her sketching of him was interrupted when he’d get hard. She’d abandon her drawing and fellate him.

  His sessions with Medora continued for nearly a month until one Saturday she invited him to come over around eleven in the evening. “My time with you is too brief. I want to make a night of it. Give you an around-the-world. It drives the boys crazy.”

  He wasn’t certain what an around the world meant, but was intrigued at the prospect. That night a heavy snowstorm descended on Andover, and, anticipating his visit, Hump borrowed a pair of skis from the school athletic room and stored them in his tiny bedroom.

  When the Boyces seemed to be deep into their nightmares and snores, he raised his window and slipped out of the dorm, attaching his skis and gliding his way to Medora’s studio.

  That night there were no nude sketches. Hump quickly learned that Medora’s talented tongue could not only tame a hardened penis, but knew how to explore every crevice of a male body.

  Regrettably when returning to the dormitory in the pre-dawn hours, Hump was greeted by Boyce who caught him trying to sneak back into his window with the skis. The two men wrestled in the snow. Boyce’s coat was ripped, his head injured.

  The next morning, Headmaster Stearns called Hump into his office, informing him that he was expelled and was to check out of the dormitory that day, taking the train back to New York. “You are not worthy of the Academy,” Stearns told him. “I predict you’ll be a miserable failure in life, and have so informed Dr. Bogart.”

  By three o’clock on that snowy day in 1918, Hump had told Floyd goodbye and was on the train to Boston where he’d catch a larger train bound for New York.

  Fearing the wrath of his parents, he decided that before he reached Manhattan he would take charge of his own life. He was going to make some bold career move and announce it the moment he came into the Bogart living room.

  Before the train neared the outskirts of New York, Hump had made up his mind. The United States had already joined with the Allies to fight Germany in World War I. He’d join the fray.

  Beginning tomorrow morning he was going to enlist in the U.S. Navy and would write his friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt, of his decision. The date was May 28, 1918.

  ***

  If his parents had been cold and distant when he joined the Navy in the closing weeks of World War I, the Brady family was just the opposite. Brady Sr., Alice, Grace, and especially Bill Jr. were saddened to see him go. Each family member, promising to be on shore to welcome him home whenever his discharge might eventually arrive, had hugged and kissed him.

  At the Bogart home, Maud would surely have dismissed such a farewell “as cheap theatrics common among Jews.” She had given Hump a handshake, as had Belmont. His sisters, Frances and Catherine, had each kissed his cheek and wished him a safe return.

  On June 19, 1918, a doctor at the Brooklyn Naval Base found that Hump was free of both syphilis and gonorrhea. In the event of Hump’s death while overseas, he was told that his father would collect $35.90 per month for six months.

  If he thought life was regimented at Andover, Hump was hardly prepared for the severe discipline of basic training which began July 2 at the Pelham Park Reserve in New York.

  By November 9, about four months later, he was pronounced fit for duty and assigned to the USS Leviathan, a transport ship with a trio of gigantic funnels and zebra-like camouflage stripes. He came aboard as a helmsman, but even before the ship sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, news reached the crew of the armistice. Germany had surrendered on& November 11, 1918, and World War I was at an end.

  There was still a job for the crew of the Leviathan, however. Ironically, it had originally been commissioned as the Vaterland and assigned to transport the Kaiser’s forces. However, when the United States and Germany declared war, the Vaterland was in Hoboken and was seized by the United States Treasury Department. After some repairs and alterations, it was rechristened the Leviathan. Capable of carrying 14,500 men, it was the largest transport ship in the U.S. Navy.

  Although he’d never seen active duty, Seaman No.1123062 put on his sailor’s dress uniform with its knotted cravat and white puttees for a victory parade in Brooklyn. The next morning he sailed for Liverpool.

  The vessel had been assigned for the next six months to haul U.S. servicemen back from France and England. En route to England, a junior officer, Robert Browne, demanded that Hump carry away some coffee cups and dirty dishes that had been left on deck by the officers. “Not my detail,” Hump informed Browne. The officer kicked him in the face, bloodying his nose. “When an officer speaks to you and issues a command, you obey orders, boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hump answered. There is no further record of Hump showing insubordination to an officer. Quickly learning that the U.S. Navy was not a democracy, he was a dutiful sailor until his term of duty came to an end.

  All those stories, many made up by Bogie himself or his biographers, about the action he saw in World War I were inspired more by the bottle than real life. Bogie was a lot tougher on screen in his trench coat, carrying a gun, than he was in his Navy bell bottoms. Before heading overseas, he was widely quoted as proclaiming, “I’m not afraid of death.”

  He had no reason to be. The naval historian, Richard Wright, in a report filed with the State Department, wrote, “No troopship coming to the coast of France or England by an American escort was successfully attacked. The U.S. Navy transported two-million troops without losing a single man.”

  That didn’t mean that Hump was freed of all the horrors of war. He was forever scarred by what he’d witnessed when returning soldiers were brought aboard his vessel. The young and the healthy came back from the battlefields “without a scratch.” But other, sadder men had lost legs or arms on the battlefields of Eastern France. Some soldiers who’d been the victim of mustard gas were permanently wrecked. “When I saw the suffering of these men, and even though I was just a teenager, the terror of war struck my heart,” Bogie was later to say. “War no longer seemed the grand adventure it had when I first sailed.”

  In later years, it was widely publicized that Bogie had received the famous injury to his upper lip when the Leviathan came under German shelling. That was just a fanciful tale conjured up in Hollywood long after the war was over, the U-boat menace itself something for the history pages. In later years, Bogie was embarrassed by his lack of action in World War I, and often invented stories to im
press his cronies.

  Over the years, Bogie also took particular delight in describing shore leave when he’d take the train from whichever French port where the Leviathan had docked, heading for Paris and “all those French dames.” Bogie described in detail to John Huston and others how he visited the city’s famous maisons de tolerance —a graceful term for “whorehouse.” Bogie later claimed that he’d spent an entire week at one bordello on the Left Bank, venturing out only for meals. “Everything I learned about sex I learned in that house with about a dozen French-speaking prostitutes including some from Siam and Africa.”

  The biggest problem with that story is that the crew of the Leviathan was never granted shore leave to visit Paris during Hump’s entire tour of duty aboard the vessel. He did, however, dock in Southampton, England, and visited the Red Lion Pub which staged drag acts so popular with the English.

  Bogie never liked to talk about the most dramatic event of his military career. In February of 1919, he was transferred from the Leviathan to the USS Santa Olivia, which would be sailing from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Brest, France.

  For a final night of fun, he’d gone to The Gilded Cage, a notorious bar in Hoboken that catered to lonely sailors, relieving them of their money and their misery with “some of the most beautiful girls in Jersey.”

  The bar was run by a German-born lesbian, “Isak Smith,” who claimed to be Swedish because of anti-German sentiment in the United States at the time. Apparently her real name was Isak but she changed her last name to Smith because it sounded American. Isak was said to have “auditioned” all the girls who worked in her bar before turning them loose to hustle sailors.

  The Gilded Cage was famous for pushing drinks. Each working girl got a commission for every glass of overpriced booze she pushed onto a sailor. By the time many sailors reached a prostitute’s bed, they were too drunk to perform although they were charged ten dollars anyway.