Humphrey Bogart

by Darwin Porter

  Her answer to that was the loudest slamming of a door he’d ever heard.

  ***

  It was in Hartford, Connecticut on April 3, 1928, that the minor Broadway actor, Humphrey Bogart, aged 28, married Miss Mary Philips, the Broadway star. Whatever differences they had, they had momentarily suppressed them. They’d hardly worked them out.

  Arriving two hours before the wedding, Kenneth had gone into seclusion with Mary, pleading with her to, “Marry me, not Hump.” Mary had wavered back and forth between the two men, deciding first on Kenneth, then on Hump. Years later, she would sigh and say, “I was really pissed off. Why can’t a woman have two husbands? I wanted to marry both of them.”

  In time, she would.

  Kissing Kenneth good-bye and telling him to leave Hartford, Mary turned down his proposal of marriage. She held out a promise to him. “When I get back to New York, I’ll still be your wife, but only on certain nights of the week.”

  Bill Brady Jr. was Hump’s best man. The wedding was to take place at the home of Mary’s mother, Anne, at 24 Hopkins Street, an apartment in a building across from the old Hartford Public High School.

  Only ten minutes before the wedding, Hump told Bill, “I’m a fool to go through with this marriage. It has all the earmarks of a disaster—just like my marriage to Helen. History is repeating itself. She’ll probably throw Kenneth a mercy fuck a few minutes before she walks in here to say ‘I do.’”

  “Maybe the line should be changed to, ‘I just did,’” Bill said, joking with Hump and hoping to cheer him up.

  After a tearful embrace, Mary finally appeared in front of the justice of the peace, her guilty eyes avoiding Hump’s. The couple exchanged marriage vows, even a promise to forsake all others, although Hump knew that was a meaningless promise.

  After the ceremony, when he’d put a ring on Mary’s finger and kissed her, Hump stood in front of a bowl of punch with the justice of the peace. “We know what a fine star Miss Philips is. Or should I say Mrs. Bogart? But what kind of actor are you?”

  “They call me a ‘white pants Willy,’” he said.

  “What does that mean? I’m afraid I’m not familiar with show business terms.”

  “A handsome but callow young man who is a staple in many drawing-room comedies.”

  As they were at the train station heading back to New York, Hump and Mary got caught up in a torchlight parade for Hartford’s newest mayor, “Batty” Batterson, who’d just been narrowly elected despite widespread allegations of vote fraud.

  After a one-night stopover in Manhattan, during which Mary was gone for two hours for drinks with Kenneth, Mary and Bogart headed for a two-week honeymoon in Atlantic City. “It was the beginning of ten years of deepening misery for me,” Bogie in the years to come would say in recalling his New Jersey honeymoon.

  When the honeymooners returned to New York, Mary immediately called Kenneth who told her that he was leaving in the morning on a train bound for Los Angeles. He was going to break into the movies and had been promised a “really big part.”

  Mary kissed Hump good-bye and told him, “I just have to spend this final night with Kenneth. I’m sure you’ll understand. After all, I’ve been with you for two entire weeks.”

  He wished her a good time. He’d just read in a Broadway column that Helen had returned from her engagement in London. He called her apartment. After receiving her congratulations on his new marriage, he asked her if he could come over and spend the night.

  “You’re always welcome,” she said.

  After putting down the receiver, he headed for the shower. He wanted to look handsome and well-groomed for Helen.

  That would mark the beginning of an affair with his first wife that would last for the entire duration of his marriage to his second wife, Mary Philips.

  ***

  The next week Hump went to the theatrical agents, Charles Frohman Productions, and signed on with them, telling them he wanted to break into the movies. As Helen’s representative, Frohman had secured lawyers for Helen and gotten her out of trouble when she was arrested for appearing in the lesbian play, The Captive. Even so, Hump wasn’t very cooperative, but one of the staff members, Sheila Crystal, took a liking to Hump and felt that he might photograph well. She’d already seen two plays in which he’d appeared. She was also aware that Broadway columnists still compared his looks to the dead actor, Valentino.

  Hump left the agency thinking nothing would come of his signing on. In two weeks, Sheila called him. Even without a screen test, she’d secured him the male lead in a two-reeler, The Dancing Town. “The star will be Helen Hayes,” Sheila said. “That’s Helen Hayes with an s, not Helen Haye. Everybody gets those two gals mixed up.”

  That night on his tour of the speakeasies with Mary, Hump was thrilled at the offer. He was disappointed in Mary’s reaction. “Films are just a novelty,” she said. “I think in a few years there will be no films. The theater is the only place for an actor. I told Kenneth that, but the fool wouldn’t listen. He’s dreaming of seeing himself up on that silver screen.”

  “You’ve got it ass backwards,” he said. “All the big Broadway stars today will be forgotten a hundred years from now. Films like that crap Valentino made will still be shown.”

  The day he went to meet Helen Hayes, Hump was excited to be working with her. He’d never met her, but another Helen, his first wife, knew her well. Both of them had gone to see Hayes in the Broadway play, To the Ladies, in which she’d appeared from 1922 to 1924. She’d had great success in Oliver Goldsmith’s ribald 18th-century comedy, She& Stoops to Conquer, and she’d followed that by playing Cleopatra in George Bernard Shaw’s& Caesar and Cleopatra.

  Hayes had married the same year that Hump had wed Mary Philips. Her husband was the very handsome Charles MacArthur, whom Hump knew casually from their long nights spent drinking at Tony’s saloon. Hump was surprised that the demure and ever so elegant Hayes would marry a hard-drinking, hard-living playwright like Charles MacArthur, who was having his big Broadway success with his memorable play, The Front Page.

  When Hump had first met MacArthur, he was having affairs with both Dorothy Parker and Ned Sheldon, the playwright with whom he had collaborated on the 1926 play, Lulu Belle. Hump knew that MacArthur swung both ways, but he didn’t know if Miss Hayes knew that, and it wasn’t his job to tell her. Bill Brady Jr. always claimed that, “MacArthur will drop his trousers for anybody, male or female, if he’s drunk enough.” Like his own marriage, Hump didn’t give the Hayes/MacArthur union much of a chance.

  Hayes was hardly the First Lady of the American Theater the day Hump met her at a studio in Queens. But she was every bit a lady. She was so tiny she made him feel tall. If modern generations have an image of Helen at all, it is of a grandmotherly looking woman with gray hair. But when Hump met her, Helen was “the serpent of the Nile,” and she’d appeared in a number of flapper roles, although he felt that she was “too pure” to have any real sex appeal.

  Over coffee, and waiting for the cameras to be set up, Helen confessed that she was planning to accompany her husband to Hollywood where he wanted to become a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “Now that the flickers have learned to talk, maybe I’ll consider a film career as well. Heaven only knows, I’m no sex pot who can do bathtub scenes like Gloria Swanson.”

  “I think you’re a very sexy lady, and within the hour I expect to be making mad, passionate love to you.”

  “Heavens,” she said, “I’m flattered. You’re very handsome, not as much so as my Charles, but a very good-looking man. I’m faithful to my husband, though, even if he isn’t to me.”

  Apparently, she already knew about her husband’s extramarital affairs. “I wasn’t making a proposition,” Hump said. “I’ve read the script. It calls for us to make mad, passionate love.”

  “Oh, I see.” She looked embarrassed. “It’s in the script?”

  “I suggest we at least do some heavy kissing before the cameras are turned on us,
” he suggested. “After all, if you and I are going to become movie stars, we don’t want to appear like limp dish rags when we embrace on screen.”

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “Lillian Gish has always warned me that the camera—unlike the stage—picks up every facial nuance.”

  His lips already moist, he wetted them again as he went over to her in her dressing room and took her in his arms. He gently pressed his mouth down on hers. At first she resisted but soon gave in, reaching to put her small arms around him.

  The kissing scene was going so well that he inserted his tongue ever so gently into her mouth, not knowing what she’d think of this French kissing. He seemed to be getting to her.

  Although it was hardly called for in the script, he placed his hand on her thigh and started moving to the North Pole. He’d never know what might have happened because suddenly there was a rude knock on the door. The director wanted both of them on the set.

  Hump would later recall that their love-making on the silver screen never matched their warm-up in Helen’s dressing room.

  Regrettably, there are no known copies of this two-reeler today, which starred two of the most famous actors of the 20th century, Helen Hayes and Humphrey Bogart.

  ***

  “I’m impotent.” Hump walked with Stuart Rose along a serene lake near Fairfield, Connecticut where Mary and he were renting a house next to his brother-in-law and his sister, Frances.

  “It’ll pass,” Stuart assured him. “Just give it time.”

  He took hold of Stuart’s arm and confronted him. “Has it ever happened to you and Frances?”

  “Can’t say that it has, but it happens to a lot of men,” Stuart said. “More than they’ll tell you. My own father was impotent for two years before he got it back again.”

  “If only Mary didn’t make it worse,” Hump said. “When I can’t get it up, she mocks me and ridicules me. I should never have married her.”

  Stuart looked deeply into Hump’s eyes. “What’s the real problem?”

  “It’s the kind of marriage we have,” Hump said. “I think she’s still in love with Kenneth. She sleeps around and tells me about it. She says that what she can’t get at home she finds somewhere else. She claims most men don’t have my problem.”

  “Where’s Mary now?” Stuart asked.

  “She’s gone back to New York,” Hump said. “We’ll probably get a divorce. My reputation will be ruined on Broadway. No gal will want to sleep with me ever again.”

  The marriage was saved by a three-act comedy, The Skyrocket, that was set to open January 11, 1929 at the Lyceum Theatre. It was produced and directed by Guthrie McClintic, who had hired Kenneth’s brother, Jo Mielziner, as the set designer.

  Mary was cast as the star, with Humphrey playing her husband. After reading the script, he told Jo, “It’s another one of those sprig parts. But I need work so I’ll take it.”

  It was like a Broadway homecoming for Hump. Guthrie had directed Saturday’s Children two years earlier, with Jo doing the sets. The script was one of those rags-to-riches-to-rags stories. Couple strikes it rich but money makes them unhappy. They go broke again and find true love and happiness in their poverty.

  Hump’s role as “Rims” in Saturday’s Children had been minor, and he hadn’t really gotten to know its director as he’d filled in for another actor after the show was blocked. Both Mary and he were eager to work with the director, Guthrie McClintic.

  In their daydreams, Mary and Hump fantasized with each other about becoming the “second Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell.” And whereas Woollcott hadn’t been impressed with Hump’s stage “sprig,” he was overwhelmed by Guthrie’s wife, Katharine, calling her “The First Lady of the Theater.” Helen Hayes claimed that position for herself as well, as did Lynn Fontanne, Cornell’s two chief rivals for glory.

  Even without Woollcott’s usual hyperbole, Cornell was indisputably the reigning Broadway star of the second quarter of the 20th century. When she’d made her debut in 1921 in Nice People, her future husband, then a young casting director, saw her performance and recorded in his notebook. “Interesting. Monotonous. Watch.”

  By the autumn of that year, he’d married her, forming a theatrical union that lasted forty years until his death in 1961, in spite of the fact that she was a lesbian and he was a homosexual. At the time of his death she abandoned the stage. “I can’t go on without Guthrie,” she told the press.

  When Guthrie told his two stars, Mary and Hump, that his wife was going to visit for the final rehearsal, they were thrilled and were glad to have been warned. They planned to give their best performances during the rehearsal even if it left them drained for opening night.

  Guthrie had also told them that Cornell, following such great theatrical successes as W. Somerset Maugham’s The Letter and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, planned to manage her own productions in the future. Mary told Hump that if Cornell were impressed with them, she might hire them for one of her shows.

  On the day of the final run-through, Guthrie delayed The Skyrocket for one hour, waiting for his wife. Cornell finally showed up. In a beautifully tailored suit, she took a seat in the final row of the theater. Like an imperial grande dame, she signaled her husband that the show could begin.

  At the end of the performance, the curtain was pulled shut. When it was opened again, Mary and Hump stepped forward, hoping to hear the applause of Cornell. Guthrie told them that she’d left the theater but had written a note for them. It was addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Bogart.”

  Dear Aspirant Thespians,

  Although you struggled, and I’m sure performed, to the best of your ability, this Skyrocket will never make it to heaven. Actually, the two of you are not to blame. The playwright, Mark Reed, deserves full responsibility. His mother should have smothered him at birth.

  All good wishes,

  Katharine Cornell

  Somewhere during rehearsals, Hump had regained his confidence and his sexual prowess and was once again sleeping with Mary. The attack from Cornell destroyed his confidence once again. On opening night he was jittery and explosive.

  To compound his fears of an impending disaster, Mary chose that horrendously inappropriate moment to confess to an infidelity that had been going on right before his eyes, even though he hadn’t seen it.

  “I’ve been having an affair with Jo,” she said. “I guess I missed Kenneth now that he’s gone Hollywood. They say if a gal goes for one brother, she can go for another. Actually I find Jo better in bed than Kenneth. Brothers don’t make love the same way.”

  Hump wanted to slap her, even belt her a good one, but was told that the curtain was going up. He was understandably nervous on opening night, especially after Mary’s revelations. Critics pronounced Skyrocket a “showy counterfeit.” One called it “spurious.” Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Bogart received only faint praise.

  An out-of-town critic from Hartford, John Davenport, wrote, “It’s surprising that the two stars, Mary Philips and Humphrey Bogart, are in fact newlyweds. There is absolutely no chemistry between them on stage at all.”

  Of all the critics that night, Davenport was the only one who got it right. Skyrocket quickly closed, and both Mary and Hump found themselves out of work once again.

  His bouts of impotence continued on and off for several months. He told Bill that his marriage was a “sometimes thing.” Mary seemed more excited to get a letter from Kenneth in Hollywood than she did in going out to the speakeasies with her new husband. Sometimes she’d disappear for a week at a time and never tell Hump where she’d been or with whom. “When I’m gone, feel free to date other women,” she told him.

  No other woman interested him. It wasn’t that he wanted only Mary. He didn’t want any woman. One night when he’d been alone and drinking heavily in his apartment for three days, Bill Brady Jr. arrived unexpectedly, finding Hump unbathed, unshaven, and almost suicidal.

  “I finally figured out what’s the m
atter with me,” Hump said, heading to the kitchen to pour himself another drink. “I’ve decided I’m a homosexual.”

  “We all go through periods like that,” Bill said. “Our own relationship is a perfect example of that.”

  “It’s worse than you think,” Hump said. “The other night I was trying to jack off. I willed my mind to think of Mary, but the thing that did it for me— the image that made me pop off—was thinking of what Stuart looked like naked.”

  “I’m jealous,” was all Bill said. “Now come on, big boy, we’re going to give you a bath, sober you up a bit, and take you out on the town. Stuart will have to be put on the backburner. You’re my date for tonight.” Bill winked at him.

  As the weeks went by, Hump continued to be filled with loathing of himself and self-doubt about his manhood. It was one of the most morbidly depressing periods of his life, and at times he contemplated suicide. He later told Bill, “I never get beyond the thinking stage of it. I just can’t see myself taking a razor to my throat.” Bill tried his best to cheer him up and break his mood.

  Alone in his apartment on one of the blackest days of his life, Hump saw no future for himself, certainly no career in the theater. His marriage to Mary was rapidly deteriorating, in ways that evoked the earlier collapse of his marriage to Helen.

  But ironically, he had resumed seeing Helen again whenever Mary was away. With Helen, he didn’t experience impotence, only with Mary. Helen always made him feel like a man.

  One night at a speakeasy, when he’d been battling with Mary, he told her, “On those rare occasions with you when I can get it up—that is, when you’re not trying to take a razor to my balls—I feel you’re thinking about getting plugged by Kenneth and not by me.”

  “A lady is entitled to her fantasies,” Mary had said, rising from her chair and staggering toward the bar to order another drink.