Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Alone with Hump, Helen remained in seclusion at her apartment, refusing to see anyone and turning down all interviews. In desperation, Hump called Bill Jr. “You know how high strung she is. The arrest has done her in. She’s having a nervous breakdown, and I don’t know what to do.”

  “For Christ’s sake, call Belmont,” Bill advised. “He can shoot her up with morphine, and everything will be okay.”

  ***

  When she’d recovered, Helen secured an audition for Hump with the noted director, Guthrie McClintic, to test for the three-act comedy, Saturday’s Children by Maxwell Anderson. Ironically, Hump knew that the part of Rims O’Neil was up for grabs because he’d already been called by his pussy posse cohort and the play’s set designer, Jo Mielziner. Originally the actor, Roger Pryor, had created the role but he had dropped out of the competition after being hospitalized for bleeding ulcers.

  McClintic liked Hump’s audition and gave him the part. He had only hours to learn the role. Back at Helen’s apartment she stayed up all night rehearsing him.

  The star of the play, Ruth Hammond, virtually ignored Hump. All she’d said to him backstage was, “Mary Boland has already warned me about you.” He thought that Hammond was unprofessional because she upstaged all the other actors.

  Hump did not get along with the male star of the comedy either. The Hoosier actor, Richard Barbee, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, had gone to Princeton. Hump felt that Barbee too closely modeled himself after one of Fitzgerald’s fictional characters and was not particularly convincing on stage.

  Hump struck out with the stars of the play, but was befriended by two members of the supporting cast, Ruth Gordon and Beulah Bondi, both of whom would go on to become celebrated in the theater and in films.

  If Hump was known as a kidder and a needler, he met his match when the director introduced him to Ruth Gordon, who was playing a minor role in Saturday’s Children. Three years older than Hump, she was witty and urbane, known for making such remarks as, “The rich have no friends. They merely know a lot of people.”

  Despite her ribbings, he was immediately attracted to this daughter of a ship’s captain. Their affair, launched the week after their initial meeting, lasted about as long as his romance with Shirley Booth. Gordon later said, “It was over before it even began. I think we had sex. But who remembers so far back, and what difference would it make if I did remember? He’s got Betty now, and I’ve got Garson.”

  At the time she met Hump, Gordon didn’t have playwright Garson Kanin, sixteen years her junior. She was married to actor Gregory Kelly, who would die in 1927.

  Before heading for a prolonged run in Chicago, Saturday’s Children would last for 310 performances on Broadway at& the Booth Theatre. The play was not all that Hump& was headed for, as his short-term marriage to Helen was rapidly coming to its predictable end.

  Newspapers were still comparing Hump’s look to that of Valentino, but actually he more closely resembled the newspaper columnist, Ed Sullivan, who at the time wrote a Broadway gossip column for the Daily News. A rock-faced Irishman with a hot temper, Sullivan also had a painful shyness and a disdain for phonies.

  Sullivan would later achieve international fame on CBS’s variety program, Toast of the Town (1948-55), later called The Ed Sullivan Show (1955-71). The show became a national institution, introducing to American audiences such talents as Elvis Presley (Sullivan refused to allow cameramen to photograph him below the hips) and later the sensational appearance of the Beatles.

  As he made his rounds across the scope of the Broadway speakeasies, Hump often had gossips come over to him, giving him hot tips for Sullivan’s column tomorrow. Since Hump liked to put people on, he never revealed to them that he was an actor, not the newspaper journalist, Ed Sullivan. With a perverted and not altogether kind sense of humor, Hump would often confide some very indiscreet gossip to these strangers. That gossip in most cases got back to its target. Sullivan in the late Twenties found himself in a number of feuds with show biz personalities, never knowing the reason why.

  One night, Hump wandered alone into the Mayfair Supper Club, since some of New York’s prettiest and most available showgirls frequented the place. He was free to go out on the town because Helen was in Boston. She claimed it was on business, but Hump suspected that it was an off-the-record sexual tryst.

  At a red leather banquette and at the best table in the club, New York’s handsome and newly elected mayor, Jimmy Walker, was in the company of two long-legged showgirls, one blonde, one a redhead.

  Walker was a dapper dresser, though not as flamboyant in attire as Gentleman Jim. Unlike the champ, who preferred to date drag queens, Walker preferred Ziegfeld showgirls when he was not occupied with his mistress.

  “Hi, Ed,” the mayor called out to Hump. “Loved your column today. C’mon over.”

  Hump thought that his ultimate coup would be to allow New York’s mayor to mistake him for Ed Sullivan. He came over to the mayor’s table and was introduced to the two “ladies” of the evening. Hump joined the party not only for dinner but for a round of drinking. Even though booze was prohibited, Walker always said that that law didn’t apply to New York’s mayor or his guests.

  Still impersonating Sullivan, Hump entertained the mayor and his guests with racy stories about Broadway personalities, gossip so hot it couldn’t be printed in his column.

  Later he joined the mayor heading for the men’s room and pissed beside him at one of the club’s porcelain urinals. The men did the obligatory pecker-checking, which caused the well-hung mayor to whisper, “Looks like you can take on one of the gals tonight as well as I can.” Shaking himself dry, Walker said, “I had planned to sneak away with both of them. But I’ve had a bad day. I’ve got a hell of a meeting tomorrow at City Hall. Some farthole is accusing me of being on the take. So please, my good boy, Ed, take one of the bitches off my hands for the night.”

  “I’d be happy to oblige your Lordship,” Hump said.

  Back at table, Hump had assumed that the mayor would select the blonde over the redhead, because Walker was well known for liking blondes. Surprisingly, he chose the redheaded stripper, Rhonda Miles, who billed her act—for some strange reason—as “Ringworm.” Into her second bottle of Staten Island champagne, Rhonda giggled. “When I first met Jimmy, he told me he only went for blonde fluff. I went and got myself dyed down there, and Jimmy is anxious to see the results. Tomorrow he’s gonna pay to have my whole head dyed blonde.”

  Since he was ordered to do so by the mayor himself, Hump disappeared into the evening with the blonde stripper, who billed herself as Mabel Norman, perhaps in the hope that her audience would equate her stage name with the famous silent screen comedienne, Mabel Normand.

  Without ever knowing why, Ed Sullivan found himself uncharacteristically thought of as a stud in the weeks ahead. Mabel Norman, thinking Hump was Ed, had given Hump’s performance in bed a rave review.

  Sullivan never found out the reason for his sudden popularity with Broadway showgirls.

  ***

  Producer John Turek’s decision in 1927 to revive that tired old chestnut, a three-act farce, Baby Mine, was a move he’d regret. Turek had seen Saturday’s Children, and had been impressed with Hump’s performance, considering him ideal for the role of the straight-laced juvenile husband, Alfred Hardy, in Margaret Mayo’s successful play, which had run for 287 performances when it had originally opened back in 1910.

  It was a great year on Broadway and Turek faced stiff competition from other shows, notably Sydney Howard’s oedipal melodrama, The Silver Cord ; Philip Barry’s witty Paris Bound, and Eugene O’Neill’s innovative The Great God Brown.

  That 320-pound mass of blubber, Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle had signed to star as Jimmy Jenks in Baby Mine. The screen comedian had arrived in New York hoping for a comeback, following his acquittal on charges of raping and killing Virginia Rappé in a San Francisco hotel suite several years previously.

  His once flourishing multi-million-d
ollar screen career was at an end, as his movies were boycotted in spite of his acquittal. In three trials for manslaughter, all the witnesses and even the district attorney had lied, frequently changing their stories. The first two juries could not reach a verdict but the third acquitted Arbuckle.

  From their first meeting, Hump was antagonistic toward Arbuckle. Hump told Turek, “Frankly, I think whale blubber killed that slut, Virginia Rappé. But even sluts deserve to live. I heard Arbuckle is impotent. Can’t get a rise out of his little dickie. That’s probably why he had to use a milk bottle.”

  At first, rumors were spread that Arbuckle had raped Rappé with a jagged piece of ice. Later the rumor was changed, the jagged ice story giving way to a milk bottle. The bottle was said to have ruptured Rappé’s bladder, causing her eventual death.

  On the first day of rehearsals, and to show his contempt, Hump asked the stage manager to deliver an empty milk bottle to Arbuckle’s dressing room. Hump had penned a note and attached it to the bottle: “Either call me in to handle your next piece of tail or use this on her.”

  After that, the fat comedian never spoke to Hump throughout the short duration of the play, except on stage when he had to.

  Although Hump detested the star of Baby Mine, he told Bill Brady Jr. that he had fallen “madly in love” with the young actress playing the juvenile female lead in the show. She was the very lovely Lee Patrick, a smallish young woman with fair hair, which she wore bobbed like a flapper. Most directors found her face “kind instead of sexy.”

  Still very young, Patrick had not developed the persona of the brash, sassy blonde she would play in many of her upcoming sixty-five films. She is remembered today for playing the ditsy Henrietta Topper in the Topper television series. She also appeared in a number of film classics, playing second fiddle to Bette Davis in the 1942 Now, Voyager ; the 1945 Mildred Pierce with Joan Crawford, and the 1948 The Snake Pit with Olivia de Havilland. Ironically, one of her most remembered roles was as Effie Perrine, the secretary and confidante in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon opposite none other than Bogie himself.

  Hump found that his role of a priggish young husband in Baby Mine was silly and not convincing. Patrick played the role of his wife, an addictive flirt who maneuvers her way into a lunch alone with Hump’s best friend. When he learns of this “transgression,” Hump’s character walks out on his wife. As part of the intricately contrived plot, Patrick “rents” three babies for an afternoon and, in a dramatic presentation, claims to Hump that all of them belong to her. Finally, Hump learns the truth about these ridiculous episodes, interprets them as minor but adorable quirks of his flirtatious wife’s personality, and agrees to let her return to his home and hearth.

  Hump’s very Victorian role lacked style, grace, and humor, and he was forced to deliver such lines as, “My wife had the effrontery, the bad taste, the idiocy to lunch in a public restaurant with that blackguard.” The blackguard referred to was supposed to be Hump’s best friend in the play.

  Throughout the early rehearsals Hump avidly pursued Patrick, giving her candies and flowers. She repeatedly turned down his overtures until the second week when she agreed to have dinner with him at The 21 Club. After a few drinks, he propositioned her, and she turned him down once again. Finally, she said, “I’ll go to bed with you on one condition.”

  “And that is?” he asked.

  “That you’ll marry me. I know you’re already married to Helen. But everybody on Broadway knows it’s not a real marriage. The reason I insist on marriage is that I long ago decided that when I go to bed with a man, it’s going to be forever.”

  Startled, Hump almost left her alone in 21 and fled into the night until his hormones won the battle. He took her back to a hotel room where he seduced her “in the missionary position,” as he later confided to Bill Brady Jr. “None of that Louise Brooks kinky stuff—not with a virgin.”

  After they’d had sex, Patrick cried for what was left of the night. In between sobs, she told Hump that she had fallen in love with him and that there would never be another man in her life but him.

  The next day at rehearsals, she confided to him that she had disliked the sex intensely and that it had hurt her. “A friend of mine told me yesterday that the first time always& hurts, but it gets better the second and third time until a woman starts to enjoy it.”

  Hump told her that was true, and round two and round three—each played out in the same hotel bed—soon followed. But by the time the play opened, he was already losing interest in Patrick. As he confided to Brady, “It’s too much like fucking a nun.”

  Baby Mine opened on the night of June 7, and the house was packed. Hump felt that audiences were more interested in seeing Arbuckle in the flesh than they were in going to the play. At the close of the final curtain on opening night, Arbuckle appeared before the audience, pleading with them not to believe all the bad press he’d received. He urged them to return again to his play and to bring their friends and relatives.

  When Hump from the wings saw the fat comedian shedding tears in front of the audience, he found the act “pathetic.” Audiences dwindled during the following nights, and Turek closed the show after only twelve performances.

  Hump not only left the play at Chanin’s Forty-Sixth Street Playhouse, he also told Patrick that their relationship was over. In her dressing room, she broke down and cried, threatening suicide. He didn’t take that threat seriously.

  Patrick went on to prove her claim that at heart she was a one-man woman and was “the true blue type.” In time she met the writer, Thomas Wood, and married him, their union lasting for forty-five years.

  ***

  After the closing of Baby Mine, Hump was out of work for only a week. A sudden call from Chicago and he was asked to get on the next train leaving New York. An actor had taken ill, and the producers wanted Hump to repeat his role in Saturday’s Children in which he’d appeared with Ruth Hammond and had had that brief affair with actress Ruth Gordon.

  Out of work and glad to get another role, Hump agreed to go to Chicago and take over the part. At her apartment, he asked Helen if she’d go with him to Chicago since she, too, was out of work. She flatly refused, claiming she was negotiating to reprise her role in Seventh Heaven on the London stage.

  Already in London and a sensation over there, Tallulah had written to assure Helen that, “The audiences will adore you, darling. Perhaps you won’t create the hysteria I do when I appear in my fancy lingerie, but you’ll go over just swell.”

  Helen’s refusal to go to Chicago led to the biggest fight yet between the Bogarts, signaling the final deterioration of their shaky marriage.

  “Me, go to Chicago?” Helen shouted at him. “I’m an actress, not a housewife, God damn you if you haven’t noticed that. A real actress, not some dumb little actor playing silly walk-ons with a tennis racquet for the mindless. Why in hell do you think I would want to sit in some fleabag Chicago hotel waiting for you to come home at night when the curtain goes down? Why indeed, when I could be the toast of London?”

  “Say it like it is,” Hump yelled back at her. “What you mean is, you’d rather be licking Tallulah’s pussy than getting fucked by me.”

  “You bastard!” She picked up a vase of flowers and hurled it at him, narrowly missing his face.

  “You fucking lez,” he yelled at her, as she picked up another object, a silver platter her mother had given her. Before she could hurl this metal missile at him, he grabbed her wrist and forced her to drop it. As a final goodbye, he punched her hard in the face, scoring a bull’s eye. The impact was so forceful that he injured his own hand. She fell to the floor as he stormed out of the apartment.

  That night in a speakeasy, he told Bill Brady Jr., “I hit her harder than I’ve ever hit anyone before. At the moment I struck her, I hated all women. I hated the power they’ve had over me. When I plowed my fist into her face, I was striking back at all women. Even Maud who made me pose nude in that art class. I was hitting every woman w
ho has ever attacked me.”

  “Maybe you’re not the marrying kind,” Bill said.

  “Maybe I’m not.” He looked at Bill, knowing that he had cheated on his wife as many times as Hump had. “You can play the game. Lie to your wife. But I want to be free of any woman. That way I can’t be accused of infidelity.”

  Over a few more drinks, Bill agreed with his friend that a Menken/Bogart divorce was inevitable. “You were completely mismatched,” Bill said. “Besides, Helen doesn’t need a husband. She needs a string of young and admiring actresses around her, some of whom she will seduce.”

  “You’re right,” Hump agreed. “If she’d wanted a real man in her life, she would have stuck it out with me even though I’m not perfect.”

  Bill’s wife, Katharine Alexander, was out of town for the weekend, and he invited Hump to spend the night with him until he was ready to catch the train for Chicago in the morning.

  Five hours later at Grand Central Station, Bill had a strange, forlorn look on his face as he embraced Hump in a goodbye. Hump would remember that hangdog expression all the way to Chicago as he rode the rails.

  Her face badly swollen, Helen was treated at a clinic in mid-Manhattan. Taking a taxi back to her apartment, she tried to conceal her large black eye from the doorman. She could make no more appearances until her wound healed.

  Before signing the contract to go to London to appear in Seventh Heaven, she filed for divorce, waiving alimony but demanding that Hump return $2,500 which he’d borrowed from her and had never repaid.

  She lied to reporters, claiming that she had been willing to give up her career and “make a real home” for Hump, but had suffered nothing but mental and physical abuse from him. “Sometimes he’d be gone for days at a time, and I never knew where he was or with whom. To him his stage career meant everything. A wife meant nothing to him other than a sometimes convenience.”