After the third week, Bill would stand for no more talk like that. He’d fallen madly in love with Katharine, and planned to make her “my exclusive property.” Within six weeks of meeting Katharine, Bill invited Hump to be his best man at their wedding. Hump asked Helen to accompany him.
Attending the wedding of Katharine and Bill must have given Helen an idea. Within weeks, she was urging Hump to marry her. She was proposing to him as if he were the prospective bride and she the groom. Hump didn’t turn her down but didn’t accept her proposal either.
He turned to his friend Bill for advice. “If I marry Helen,” he said, “I’ll be repeating Maud’s pattern with Belmont. Strong woman, the bread earner, supporting weak husband.”
“Forget about that,” Bill said. “Marry the bitch. She’s a friend of all the critics and knows all the big-name producers. She’ll advance your career. Trust me on this one. If you scorn Helen, she’ll cut off your balls. She’s already kicked them. You may never work on Broadway again.”
Hump remained uncertain and confused. At Helen’s urging, he went to secure a marriage license, which he would carry around in his wallet for the next four years. In an interview on April 5, 1922, Hump told The New York Times, “I plan to marry Helen Menken.” Because of Helen’s prominence as a Broadway star, the paper gave it a headline. Suddenly, all of Broadway became aware of the struggling actor, Humphrey Bogart. He hadn’t even married her yet, and already Bill’s advice was proving to be true. Almost overnight, producers started offering Hump parts, no doubt with a little urging from Helen herself.
With the Times announcing her engagement, Helen no longer had any reason to keep Hump a secret in the closet. Her toy boy (although men weren’t called that then) could emerge into the full theatricality of her glittering world. He would meet for the first time Miss Tallulah Bankhead, whom he had confided in Bill was “Helen’s other boyfriend.”
CHAPTER TWO
Instead of being threatened or offended by Helen’s sexual involvement with Tallulah, Hump was intrigued. He pointedly asked his friend Bill, “Just what do women do in bed together? I understand the kissing part, but the plumbing doesn’t seem quite right.”
In detail, the more worldly Bill tried to explain lesbian love and how it worked. Even so, Hump didn’t quite get it.
That evening, Bill invited him to Harlem’s Red Garter, a notorious nightclub that flourished briefly and illegally in the early 1920s until the police shut it down. Patronized only by male customers, the club specialized in presenting live sex acts on its small stage but only between women performers.
The lesbian black actress, Hattie McDaniel, was said to be a frequent patron of the club and was even rumored to have been a performer. Hattie would go on to greater fame playing Mammy to Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind. As a further irony, she was to become the lover of Tallulah Bankhead, as Tallulah in her declining years would readily admit to her homosexual “cunties,” as she called her all-male entourage.
It was a wiser and more experienced Humphrey Bogart, man of the world, who escorted Helen to the 21 Club to meet Tallulah.
When Hump was introduced, her hair looked badly combed, yet it was radiant. Her mouse-brown dress, however, should long ago have been sent to the cleaners. “Forgive my appearance, darling,” she said, aping Helen’s habit of calling everybody darling. “I’ve just gone down on John Barrymore and haven’t had time to make myself into a lady again.”
“You look beautiful,” Hump assured her. Actually he didn’t know what to make of this Alabama bombshell, although he could understand Helen’s fascination with her.
“I must ask a tiny favor,” she said. “To catch the streetcar home, I need one tiny, little, small penny as I have only four cents in my purse, hardly enough for the five-cent fare.”
“I don’t understand why you’re always broke,” Helen said, ordering a martini from the waiter at 21. “You employ a French maid.”
“I know, darling,” Tallulah said. “Daddy sends me $50 a week, and I have to give the maid half of that. That means I’m penniless for three days a week.”
“Fire the maid,” Hump said. “My mother did when the family fortune disappeared.”
“Perish the thought, darling,” Tallulah said. “No respectable lady could live in New York without a French maid. It’s simply not done.”
Helen was the more established star, but Tallulah dominated the night. Hump concluded that Tallulah was the “man” in her relationship with Helen, his girlfriend the submissive female.
“You must meet my sister, Eugenia,” Tallulah said to Hump, reaching over to caress his hand. “She’s not a classic beauty like me, but one hell of a woman. Those stories about her being a lesbian are exaggerated. She lives in an apartment next door to Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. They’ve been anxious to meet the two of you since the êw York Times referred to your coupling as a union of two Jazz Age Babies. Scott views himself as the world’s expert on Jazz Age babies.”
Since Tallulah didn’t have any money, Helen invited her to join them for dinner at Sam’s Vanity, a popular little restaurant that flourished for three months until its owner, Sam Martin, was fatally shot by his estranged wife.
At table, Tallulah stuffed herself, while claiming that Sam didn’t know how to cook Southern fried chicken. After dinner Tallulah invited them for “drinks and drugs” at the apartment of her friend, Napier George Henry Stuart Alington, the third Baron of Alington.” She called him “Naps” and claimed a passionate involvement. “John Barrymore for sex,” she said, “Ethel Barrymore if I can get her, but for true love, it’s Naps. That is, if he isn’t too busy fucking Noël Coward.”
Naps welcomed them into a plushy furnished Victorian apartment. In his mid-20s, he had a small delicate build, crowned by a mop of blond hair. His most sensuous physically was in his thick lips. He had a nervous habit of constantly licking the roof of his mouth, as if he were tasting honey.
Ushered into the living room, Helen, Hump, and Tallulah were served martinis by an English butler. Spread out on Naps’ glass-topped coffee table was a virtual shopping cart of drugs, including cocaine, heroin, and morphine, the substance so beloved by Maud and Belmont Bogart.
The heroin came in little vanity boxes, lined in red silk, evocative of Tiffany jewel boxes. Small hypodermic needles were arranged moonlike around the heroin boxes. For his drug of choice, Hump selected morphine, hoping to understand his parents’ infatuation with the drug.
Tallulah claimed that she found morphine boring and chided Hump for not selecting cocaine, which she said was the drug of the moment. Cocaine was enjoying the same type of popularity among New York’s jazz babies in the early Twenties as marijuana did among the hippies of the late Sixties. Instead of masquerade balls, “snow balls” were all the rage, and Tallulah said she attended two every week of her life.
The next day, when Hump related the drama of the previous night to Bill, Hump was a little vague on details, not that he was holding back information. He honestly claimed he couldn’t remember. “That morphine sent me into another world.”
All he recalled was that Tallulah and Helen started kissing on the sofa. “It was like a white girls’ show at the Red Garter.”
At one point Naps appeared nude in the living room and invited all of them into his bedroom.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” Hump claimed. “I think I have deliberately blotted out what happened next. I just don’t want to recall it.”
Somewhere before dawn, Helen and Hump had dropped Tallulah off at some mysterious apartment on West 51st Street, and Helen directed the cabbie to head for her own apartment.
Before stumbling out of the taxi, Tallulah extended an invitation to them for the following evening to meet the reigning literary darlings of the 1920s, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda.
“I guess I got a real introduction to your world,” Hump said to Helen in the taxi.
“Darling,” Helen said, “Until t
onight I didn’t think you were sophisticated enough to handle it. You’re a city boy but still a bit provincial.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but after that Alabama hurricane and that fucking Naps, I was really initiated. It’s a night to remember. Better yet, it’s a night to forget.”
She reached over and kissed his cheek. “It’s only the beginning, my love. Our marriage will be perfect. A shared marriage.”
“This ‘country boy’ has never heard of a shared marriage.” “
We must not be selfish,” Helen said. “You’re a gorgeous man and I’m a devastating female. We’ll have to share our marriage with others.”
“You mean, carry on like we did tonight?” he asked.
“There will be others, so many others we can invite into our marriage bed. Variety, that’s the only way to guarantee that a marriage will stay vital and not become a bloody bore. We’ll ask Zelda and Scott tomorrow night what they think about that.”
***
The following evening, Helen had to excuse herself because she’d been asked at the last minute to meet with a producer about a change of casting in her play.
Hump was the first to arrive at the Algonquin Hotel where he asked the receptionist to call up to Tallulah’s room. She claimed that she’d be down in the lobby quicker than it would take “Ethel Barrymore to slap my gorgeous face.” Hump had heard that Ms. Barrymore had slapped Tallulah’s face when the grand actress had walked into a party and caught Tallulah doing a devastating impression of her.
He was into his second drink when Tallulah showed up in the lobby in a fur coat borrowed from her much older friend, Estelle Winwood. Hump sat in a corner table. She walked over and kissed him on the lips. “Sorry Helen couldn’t make it tonight. I was hoping to be the meat in a sandwich between the two of you.”
As Tallulah started to launch into one of her many stories about the men and women pursuing her in New York, she was interrupted by the arrival of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the darlings of the New York tabloids and the embodiment of the Jazz Age. The romantic couple was already deep into a bottle of gin which Scott carried in a pocket of his raccoon coat. In contrast, Zelda wore a thin red woolen coat.
Tallulah jumped up and kissed each of the Fitzgeralds on the lips before introducing them to Hump.
Scott had already written his novel, This Side of Paradise, recounting the adventures, romantic and otherwise, of a Princeton man. He’d also published Flappers and Philosophers.
Standing in front of Scott and Zelda in the flesh, Hump sensed that they were trying to become public manifestations of the flappers and “sheiks” he had described in his writing.
Shaking Scott’s hand, Hump found him rather effeminate. A woman newspaper columnist, Rena Willson, had only recently written a feature story about him. She had claimed that “Scott’s face dances between pretty boy and handsome, and his long-lipped mouth virtually cries out for lipstick and belongs more on a girl than a young man.”
As Zelda and Tallulah excused themselves to go to the powder room, Scott settled onto the banquette opposite Hump. Watching the women go, he expressed his disappointment that he wouldn’t have a chance to meet Helen tonight. “I’ve seen her latest play and thought she gave a brilliant performance.”
“I’ll convey that to her,” Hump said.
“Before the ladies get back, I’ve got to ask you something,” Scott said. “I read in the papers that you and Helen are getting married. Forgive me, but have you slept with her yet, or are you waiting until the wedding?”
Ever the kidder, Hump startled Scott by looking at him with a deadpan expression and saying, “In all honesty, I can say that I don’t recall.”
Scott weighed that for a moment then burst into laughter, putting his arm around Hump. “You’re my kind of man.”
With this trio, Hump hardly could slip in even the smallest observation. Scott, Zelda, and Tallulah had opinions about everything and everybody, and expressed them in such a candid manner as to shock society.
Tallulah went to the reception desk and placed a call upstairs to the room where John Barrymore was temporarily staying. She rushed over to Scott. “I tried to get John to come down and join us, but he’s entertaining some lucky gal. But he’ll speak to you on the phone.”
As Tallulah and Scott departed for their phone dialogue with Barrymore, Zelda slid closer to Hump. “Tallulah claims you’re a most satisfying lover, and I’m envious. Scott can’t satisfy me sexually. His equipment is too small.”
Hump had never heard a woman, much less a wife, make such an observation about her husband.
He studied her face carefully. Her dark honey-blonde hair had been given the world’s worst permanent. Her skin was pink and white, a delicate porcelain look. She had a sensual and alluring mouth and deep blue eyes that reflected a sparkling deviltry. If she had any imperfection at all, it was her sharp nose that was a bit beaky.
“The real reason Scott wants to talk to John Barrymore is that he has a crush on him,” she said. “Scott’s a fairy, you know. I’ll prove it.” She reached into her purse and produced a photograph, which she said she always carried around to parties.
Staring back at Hump was a stunning looking dame in an off-the-shoulder gown and black high heels.
“It was snapped for The Triangle Club at Princeton,” Zelda said. “Scott appeared in a play this way in drag, and his picture was circulated all over campus. He was hailed as the Princeton Play Girl.”
“Since there are no women undergraduates at Princeton,” Hump said, “men play the female parts. I know this actor, Jimmy Cagney, who launched himself in show business doing drag.”
“That may be true, but why was Scott chosen to play the beautiful show-girl?” Zelda asked.
Before he could answer, Scott and Tallulah returned. He seemed thrilled at having talked to The Great Profile himself.
The waiter kept the quinine water flowing to their table, and Scott kept lacing their drinks with gin. Hump was amazed that Zelda seemed to be encouraging Scott to drink. As Scott was engrossed in conversation with Tallulah, Hump leaned over to Zelda. “If you get him too drunk, he won’t be able to write in the morning.”
“That’s fine with me,” she said with a smirk on her face.
“But he’s a writer. Writers have to write.”
“Are you suggesting that I’m jealous of his work and want to keep him from writing?” she asked. “I have no reason to be jealous. In time I’m going to write fiction myself. The world can judge who is the better novelist.”
Drunk and out on the street again, Scott dared them to race toward the theater district. With Hump reluctantly trailing behind, Zelda, Scott, and Tallulah darted down the crowded sidewalk, not caring if they bumped into someone. They were like crazed young things without a care in the world.
Even though he ran to keep up with them, Hump felt that all of them were like some incorrigible undergraduates he’d known at Andover. With the wind blowing through his hair, Scott led them right into the dense traffic along Seventh Avenue. “We’ll defy death,” he shouted back at them.
Shortly after their arrival at a popular dance club, Montmartre, plenty of bootleg hooch suddenly became available. Both Tallulah and Zelda found the patrons “sluggish.” Zelda suggested that she and Tallulah take to the dance floor and enliven the joint.
As the orchestra struck up an inappropriate Highland Fling, Zelda whirled around the suddenly emptied dance floor turning cartwheels for the amusement of the crowd. Right on her heels was Tallulah, equally adept at turning cartwheels herself. The only difference between the two performers was that Tallulah had forgotten to put on her bloomers.
At Scott’s suggestion, the party moved to the Plaza Hotel. In those days newspaper photographers were always posted in the lobby, hoping to take pictures of celebrities coming and going.
Seeing the cameramen, Scott did a handstand in the lobby, as his picture was snapped. Getting to his feet again, he told Hump. “I’m sure to ge
t my picture in the papers in the morning. I haven’t been mentioned for an entire week, so I had to do something.”
Zelda suggested to Tallulah that she and Hump join Scott and her in one of their favorite games on the elevator. Once inside the cage, she said that they were to ride up and down. When the door opened to let on new passengers, they were to shock the hotel guests by having Zelda kiss Tallulah on the mouth and Scott kiss Hump on the mouth. Hump didn’t much like the idea of the game, but didn’t want to live up to Helen’s accusation of him as a country boy.
For about fifteen minutes that night, they rode up and down in the elevator with Zelda kissing Tallulah and Scott kissing Hump. And indeed the hotel guests were shocked, many expressing their disapproval with outrageous indignation.
Back in the lobby, one of the photographers approached Scott, telling him that he’d run out of film after the handstand photograph was snapped. He asked Scott to do it again.
“I’ve got a better idea,” Scott said, grabbing Zelda’s hand and racing toward the door. Followed by Tallulah and Hump, he ran over to the fountain, dropping his fur coat. “Let’s go for a midnight bath,” he shouted. “Last one in is an ugly duckling.”
Scott jumped into the fountain and began splashing about, as Zelda and then Tallulah followed. Feeling like a fool, Hump jumped in with them as two shutterbugs snapped their pictures for tomorrow’s tabloids.
Out of the fountain, cold and dripping wet, Scott raced toward a cab parked in front of the hotel with Zelda trailing him. When she reached it, Zelda turned and kissed both Tallulah and Hump on the lips.
Scott leaned out the window of the cab. “Remember,” he said to both Tallulah and Hump. “You two pretty things should know that Oscar Wilde got it right. The only thing worse than being talked about is being forgotten.” Zelda jumped in the back seat of the taxi with him, as they headed off into the night.
Humphrey Bogart Page 9
