The Career and the Cult

There he stands in all his casual aloofness, a crafty, sly expression on his face, his eyes boring straight and dis+dainfully into those of the man with the gun. He is caught. The fellow's got the drop on him. What is there now for him to do but accept the humiliation that goes with being taken by surprise? But wait. He plays it cool for a moment, lets the fellow think he's captured, resigned. Then an odd move, a disconcerting comment, and he has his assailant disturbed. In that moment of hesitation, he makes a fast diversion with his foot, comes up sharp with his elbow, clips the startled man on the jaw, knocks him off balance, leaps upon him and—the tables are turned. Already the audience has rusded in anticipation of this move. The maneuver is as familiar to them as the slant of this fellow's jaw, and they love it—they tingle to it—even though they've seen it maybe a half-dozen times.

Would this be an audience watching the elegant Sean Connery in one of the currently sensational James Bond films? Or would it be Jean-Paul Belmondo, the latest movie hero in France, that this houseful of film aficionados is watching so appreciatively? No, it would be an old tough guy, a leathery Hollywood star who has been dead since 1957 but whose films are still shown as if this year's. It would be none other than Humphrey Bogart—Bogey to his millions of fans—an actor who is an idol to a host of people who weren't even born when he was making some of his best.

And where would this audience be discovered? It might be in the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Harvard Yard. It might be in the New Yorker Theater on upper Broadway in New York, or the Bleecker Street Cinema or the Eighth Street Playhouse in the Greenwich Village area. It might be at the Playhouse in Pittsburgh, or the Paramount in New Haven, or the Lyric in Lexington, Virginia, or the Loop in Chicago, or the Empire in New Orleans, or any of the dozens of theaters around the country that are now showing revivals of classic films. For they're all going in for programing what they call Bogart Festivals, having discovered that the old Bogey movies are enjoying a revival to challenge Chaplin's.

It began as far back as the summer of 1956, when the small but selective Brattle Theater booked a two-year-old Bogart film, Beat the Devil, and found it did something for the aggressively long-haired audience, made up largely of the summer population at Harvard, Radcliffe and MIT. It tickled sophisticated fancies with its wacky, slightly beat comedy, much more so than it had seemed to tickle audiences in the regular theaters its first time around. Patrons especially indicated they dug Bogey's style, his manner of being hard-boiled and contemptuous in a nice, dry, sardonic way.

The next year, the Brattle booked a package of old Warner Bros, films, one of which was Casablanca, a hit of Bogey's made in 1942. The response to it was terrific, and the Brattle's astute managers realized there was something about Bogey—about him in particular—that got its audiences here. It took to booking more of his pictures, singly and then in groups of several over a two-week period. These were known as Bogart Festivals. They have become a fixture every winter at midyear exams. And the Brattle has become the center of the Bogart cult in the U. S.

It has shown Casablanca ten times in the last eight years, The Big Sleep, a vintage Bogart picture made in 1947, eleven times. A private club in the theater building is called the Club Casablanca: The lobby walls are covered with large photo murals of Bogart, Peter Lorre and Bogey's fourth and last wife, Lauren Bacall.

Now the craze has spread from Cambridge. College students, intellectuals and just plain fans of the unusual and original in movies are flocking to Bogart Festivals, embracing this bitter, bruising character with whom they find they have a powerful empathy. That goes for the girls as well as the men. The females find there is something strangely sexy about Bogey—though what is hard to tell, as we shall see.

The craze has spawned a half-dozen Bogey books, most of dubious merit—so far. It has spread to France, too. It got going in Paris even before it did here. A shot of Belmondo in Breathless, a brutal 1960 French film, standing in front of a theater poster advertising an old Bogart film and dragging euphorically on a cigarette in imitation of the master's inimitable way, was a notable indication of how the youth of Paris felt about this curiously contemporary oldster whose films—the best ones—say more to them than many made today.

What is the powerful fascination of this old gravel-voiced movie star? What's the "Bogart mystique," as some call it? Why this post-mortem surge of a cult for an actor whose most popular pictures were made as much as a quarter of a century ago? Let's begin by observing bluntly that the fervor is for a myth that has accumulated around a character that is part fictitious and part historical. The fictitious part is the fellow Bogart plays in his favored films—the disillusioned, disenchanted individual moving through what is generally an alien world. And the historical part is the image of Bogey as a Hollywood personality of great (continued on page 158) Bosley Crowther (continued from page 112) independence, coolness, candor and disdain for the brass and all the manifestations of smugness and hypocrisy that are shown by the Establishment. This latter image emerged from his behavior in his later years—behavior that naturally attracted attention and got a great deal of unplanned and implanted publicity.

In this accumulation, the fictitious and the historical have merged, so it is hard to tell where the screen character leaves off and the historical character begins. And this blending of the two was assisted by the writers and directors of his films, who created roles for Bogey that conformed to the shape his image took. Thus the myth of Bogey is a compound of many elements—the character of Rick in Casablanca, the lonesomest loner of them all; the stories of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack, which was the name Bogey gave to the gang of his special carousing playmates in his last few years; wisps of nostalgic recollections evoked by his early gangster films; the stringent character of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, which John Huston made with him in 1941; distant echoes of his romance with Baby, which was what he called Lauren Bacall; the haunting history of his slow death by cancer, which he endured with the kind of courage that was his wont. The total myth is far from a reflection of the man that Bogart was. Yet Bogart himself was not really the man he appeared to be—the man he ultimately acted in real life just as devotedly and sincerely as the one he acted on the screen.

The fictional Bogey is constructed, crystalized and contained in some half-dozen or so of his pictures that are the staples of the Bogart Festivals. Most popular are Casablanca and Tlie Maltese Falcon, followed closely by Beat the Devil and The Big Sleep. Then come The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which in my opinion is the best of all his films, To Have and Have Not and High Sierra. A few others are shown variously. But these are the vintage pictures out of the more than 70 that Bogart acted in during the 20-odd years he was making movies. Bogart fans have their own preferences. Some, in the fashion of cultists, are most devoted to films not on this list—such atypical ones as Dark Victory and The African Queen. Actually, the essence of Bogey—the Bogey of the mesmerizing myth that is so gratifying to the hip audiences today—is pretty well concentrated in the characters of Sam and Rick, the heroes, or antiheroes, of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, respectively.

Sam is a private detective who is hired by a beautiful dame to help her in a shady caper that will allow her to get away with a fabulous jeweled statuette. He has no illusions about the woman. As a matter of fact, he suspects at the start she is lying to him. But that is what he expects. He just makes allowances for it. He is in it for what he can get. So he takes the risks, confronts the Fat Man, who is the head of the jewel-smuggling ring that the woman is trying to swindle, and at the end he walks safely away from the whole ironic fiasco. In short, Sam is an opportunist who knows all the tricks of the crooks and is wise to the mentality of the swindlers without being one himself. He is slippery, daring, uncommitted and magnificently casual toward dames (who seem to be crazy about him). But he is basically a brave and honest gent.

Likewise, Rick in Casablanca is a tough, cold American who runs a famous café in the Moroccan city in the early years of World War Two. His place is a crossroads for people who are trying to escape from Europe and move on to the free world without being stranded or arrested in this city which is hooked in to Vichy France. But Rick stands apart from their troubles. He won't help; he won't take sides. He's had it, so far as commitment to any cause or other person's interest is concerned. All be does, as he says, is run a saloon. Then along comes his old Paris girlfriend who had suddenly run out on him the day they were supposed to flee the city, leaving him disillusioned and dismayed. Now she is with her husband (of whom Rick had not been aware), who turns out to be a very important anti-Nazi polemicist. Will Rick use his squalid connections and run a risk to help them get the virtually priceless exit visas they must have to proceed; or will he, out of callousness or in rancorous requital, allow them to be returned to the Nazis? Here is the crucial invitation for the alienated tough guy to commit himself. Here is the chance for the disenchanted to show he still has a well of sentiment. Of course, Rick obtains the exit visas, commits himself to a cause and to true romance. But, being an irredeemable loner, he must flee the city and go it by himself at the end.

This is the Bogey character that the young people love today—the fellow who wants no truck with trite traditions, with all the rituals of politics, with all the bushwa of patriotism and the hypocrisy of stupid romance; but a fellow who can do something positive when he sees what really has to be done, and can do it without a lot of clatter. A man of strength and essential dignity.

One of the patrons of the Brattle Theater commented recently that he finds Bogey stimulating because he is a fabulous character within a world of fantasy—"just like James Bond," the young man added. "It is a character the average fellow dreams of being but can never hope to be." He is right when he says that Bogey is a fabulous character with qualities and capacities the average fellow admires and would long to possess. But he is wrong when he calculates Bogey inhabits a fantasy world, and he is laboring under a common misconception when he compares the Bogey character with that of Bond. The latter is much exaggerated and is played for thrills and laughs. In his wildly fantastic adventures, Bond becomes elaborately involved with conspicuously exotic women, and his melodramatic triumphs are achieved not so much by his own skill and shrewdness as by the happy intercession of luck and chance. Bogey, on the other hand, is realistic, down to earth, selective and cool. He makes calculated decisions in situations that are credible. And he is excessively cautious and economical in his relations with women. He is wise to the phonies and the tricksters. It isn't often that he gets hooked. And chance seldom intercedes for Bogey. More often it knocks him around.

Today's younger generation would like to have ideals, but it is skeptical about Idealism, just as Bogey is. It believes in personal valor, compassion, nobility of spirit, the Golden Rule; but it is wary about displaying these virtues—and it is suspicious of anyone who does. The extent of a person's qualifications for admiration and respect is revealed less in moral behavior than in personal presence and style. Certainly Bogey has style. There is eloquence in his performance—in the cool way he smokes a cigarette, sizes up another person without a flicker of feeling in his face, hikes up his trousers efficiently as he slips a gun under his belt, rolls back the corners of his upper lip as though he's trying to straighten an upper plate.

His fans know his every gesture. They know all his major pictures, too. Some even know the dialog and speak it along with him. He is for them an exposition of the fulfillment of wishful attitudes. Today's young man, cynical and anxious about the way things are going in the world, sees in the character of Bogey a cheering model of firm contempt and cool aplomb. The young woman sees him as an image of masculine self-assurance and command. Appropriately, all the better pictures have solid stories and honest dialog and, for these reasons, haven't dated to any extent through the years.

It bears consideration that Bogart's career paralleled the big events of the 20th Century that had their main effects upon people of just his age. He was born at the turn of the century—on December 25. 1899—which meant he was ripe for recruitment into the First World War. He was a young man with the Lost Generation in the Twenties, he was just at a stage to be hurt by the blow of the Great Depression, he was a mature and experienced man in the disturbing Thirties and he was old enough to comprehend the irony and the frustration of World War Two. Likewise, when that War was over, he had come into middle age and was prone to a fatalistic outlook on the ambitions and the follies of civilized man. Bogey might be regarded as the early 20th Century man.

And the pattern of his films is reflective of just this chronological flow. Discounting the group of films he made in the early Thirties, when he first went to Hollywood—such potboilers as A Devil with Women, Up the River and Love Affair—his screen career really began with his appearance in The Petrified Forest in 1936. Here he repealed the stage role he had played in support of Leslie Howard—that of a Dillinger-type gangster who tangles with a wistful intellectual in an Arizona desert lunchroom. His Duke Mantee, desperate and deadly, was one of the nastiest gangsters ever seen in films, and it launched Bogart as the latest of a disreputable but popular screen breed.

He had to be satisfied, however, with a position on the second team of tough guys at Warner Bros., the studio by which he was employed, because it already had Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney and Paul Muni as its first-string toughs. These fellows had won their letters in the classic gangster films Little Caesar, Public Enemy and Scarface, respectively. But Bogart acquitted himself nicely in an incredible run of some 25 films in a matter of five years, including a famous performance as a home-coming gangster in Dead End. And it fell to his lot (because none of the others would take what they thought was a hackneyed role) to play the hero in High Sierra, a milestone in the history of gangster films.

This prophetic picture, made in 1941, tells of the last of the red-hot gangsters, again a Dillinger type, who is finally pursued to and killed on a California mountaintop. The hero is an outlaw, a cold and ruthless thug, assumedly unworthy of anyone's sympathy. But the way Bogey plays him, in his customary dry, hard style and with the distinctive white-wall haircut of his memorable Duke Mantee, he becomes a strangely sad and lonely symbol of a vanishing American, as it were—the gangster of the Twenties and Thirties who passes on to the happy hunting grounds.

While High Sierra in no way marked the end of the gangster films (there have been hundreds of them since and, indeed. Bogey himself played in a few), it did set a sort of monument over the grave of the gangster prototype, and it does most fitlingly mark the end of the first phase of Bogey's extraordinary screen career. For John Huston, who wrote the screenplay of it, was going on to direct his first film, The Maltese Falcon; he got Bogey to play the lead, and thus, without knowing it, projected him into a new and, as it turned out, his archetypal character.

Sam Spade, who was drawn from the pages of a popular Dashiell Hammett detective tale, had been done twice before in movies, but it wasn't until he was played by Bogey, under Huston's shrewd direction and from a script Huston prepared, that he emerged the three-dimensional personality that set a style for tough detectives on the screen. Although he is on the side of law and order, he is so hip to the techniques of crime, so knowledgeable about and handy with guns, so disreputable in appearance, so cynical in his approach, you almost feel that, in him, the soul of Duke Mantee goes marching on.

The Maltese Falcon provided a transition from the first phase to the second phase of Bogart's career, for he followed it with Casablanca, in which Rick is a smoother Sam Spade, moving now in an area of more sophisticated and sinister iniquity. Now he wears a tuxedo, which Sam would never have done; he plays chess (at least, he works chess problems); he knows something about food and wine; he has a background of some cultivation; he fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War; he has a close rapport with his Negro pianist (who soothes his melancholy moments by playing As Time Cues By); but he is still a remote individual, on the shady, seamy side of life.

It is interesting that Casablanca puts him in the geographical area of wartime France, for the attitude of Rick is consistent with the disillusion and bitterness of so many of the French intellectuals who fought with the Resistance during the War and whose belief in following only one's own ideals is the heart of the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.

After Casablanca, Bogart continued this second phase with Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara, films about lough guys in the War; Passage in Marseille, wherein he moved back into the aura of a Casablanca café; and eventually arrived at To Have and Have Not, which was his first encounter with a character out of Ernest Hemingway. The juncture was appropriate, for Hemingway's type of man. who is brave, laconic, disillusioned and a strong looker-out for himself, was pretty much the type that Bogey had come to represent. His Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not is a minor variation of Sam Spade. He is closely engaged with criminals but keeps on the right side of the law. There is also a touch of Rick in him. as played by Bogey in this film. He likes to listen to nostalgic music (as played here by Hoagy Carmichael). and he gets involved in a romantic tangle with a sultry dame, played by Miss Bacall.

The Big Sleep, which offered him another private-detective role and which, because of its offbeat plotting, is now considered early post-War avant-garde, marks the end of this second phase of Bogey, for it was followed by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which gives him to us in a new and staggering aspect and leads into the third and final phase of his career.

The snarling, rapacious gold prospector Bogey plays in this classic film, which was adapted and directed by John Huston and shot almost entirely on location in Mexico, is a frightening representation of civilized man in a terminal stage—that is, the stage when he becomes so obsessed with material things that it destroys his soul. The greed that consumes this prospector as he and two partners strike a rich vein in the Mexican wilds unhinges his mind and his humanity and leads fatalistically to his death at the hands of bandits.

It could almost be that this fellow is Sam or Rick after several bitter years of hard luck or some shattering calamity has brought him to the beach in Tampico, a derelict looking for some quick way to recoup his fortunes and his inner pride. And the magnitude of his debasement at the prospect of sudden wealth could be the measure of the strain of disillusion and frustration he has undergone. Bogey's Fred Dobbs in Treasure is the epitome of the exhausted realist, grown suspicious and resentful of others and seeking madly for the security he has lost.

After Treasure—in which he did some of his finest acting, by the way—Bogart played pretty much a succession of older, tireder, run-down men. fellows who have just about had it and are not expecting much more out of life. His ragged and raunchy boattender in The African Queen, who is somewhat regenerated by the admiration of a pert old maid, is a charming mocker of manners and a salty satirist of sex. Beat the Devil brings him on as an aging con man who is having trouble with an old swindle and a young wife. In The Caine Mutiny, he is an old Navy officer who proves a coward. In The Barefoot Contessa, he is a played-out Hollywood director sadly remembering things past, especially a beautiful, tragic actress. To be sure, he did other pictures in this final phase—such as Knock on Any Door, Sabrina and his last, The Harder They Fall—but the Bogey of the films after Treasure is somehow haunted by the ghost of Fred Dobbs.

This, then, is the pattern of evolution of his screen character. Let's take a look now at the pattern of the unfolding of Bogart's life. Born in New York City, he was the cherished son of Dr. Belmont DeForest Bogart, a prominent surgeon, and his wife, Maude Humphrey, a successful commercial artist and illustrator of children's books. Momma often used her little darling as a model for her saccharin portraiture. There is extant an amusing drawing of him as a child (in girl's clothes) hanging up the wash in an advertisement for Ivory soap.

Perhaps it was his sheltered upbringing in a good middle-class home that first irritated young Humphrey—Humphrey DeForest Bogart was his full name. He went through a normally naughty boyhood in New York's private Trinity School and then went to Phillips Andover, a top-flight Eastern prep school, with the idea of going on to Yale. But he was a high school dropout, long before that became a matter of national concern. He was involved in some impious behavior at Andover, and was told to leave.

Reluctant to go home and face his parents, he enlisted in the Navy—this was 1917—and spent two years as a helmsman aboard a transport in the North Atlantic during the First World War. After service, he was an assistant tugboat inspector and a runner for a Wall Street investment house before he got a job as an assistant stage manager in a Broadway theater through the kindness of the famous producer, William A. Brady, who was a family friend.

From assistant stage manager to acting was—as the cliché has it—but a step, and Bogart quickly made it, going on first in minor roles and then on to fairly substantial supporting roles and juvenile leads. The legend that he was regularly cast as the cheery chap who came bounding on in drawing-room comedies wearing sneakers, white flannels and crying "Tennis, anyone?" has been overdone. He did play occasional lounge lizards, but he was also solidly cast in heavier fare. It is not often remembered that he supported Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, the great silent-film comic who had been banned from movies because of an unfortunate scandal, when the poor man tried to make a comeback on the stage in a show called Baby Mine in 1925.

He worked hard and was a good actor, but he hadn't distinguished himself in the 15 years before he had the good fortune of getting the role of Duke Mantee in the original stage production of Robert E. Sherwood's The Petrified Forest. And during those 15 years, he had his emotional ups and downs.

Early on, he met and courted Helen Menken, a rising star with whom he appeared in a play called Drifting. They obtained a license to be married in 1922, but they did not officially utilize it until 1926. One year of conventional matrimony and they were divorced. The following year he married Mary Phillips, another actress with whom he several times appeared. Both marriages were difficult for Bogart. He was uncomfortable when attached. (He was divorced from Miss Phillips when he later went to Hollywood.)

His first unsuccessful exposure in movies in the early Thirties discouraged him, and he was on his way to becoming a disappointed actor and a rising drunk when, at 36, he was taken to Hollywood to play Duke Mantee at the insistence of Leslie Howard. That break, which led to a long-term contract with Warner Bros. and a suddenly booming screen career, was the liberation of him. He had steady work and money at last. He had nationwide recognition. And he fell in with a Hollywood crowd that he enjoyed. Errol Flynn was his pal in much hell-raising, mostly of a boozing and prank-playing sort, which superseded tomcatting. Neither Bogart nor Flynn was in a class with the really accomplished but less publicized and therefore less famous Hollywood studs. Both were notorious tall-story tellers. Bogart was often annoyed because listeners would believe Flynn's stories and wouldn't believe his.

Other good pals in this era were Mark Hellinger, the ex-newspaperman turned filmwriter and producer, and his beautiful show-girl wife, Gladys Glad; Jimmy Cagney, Joan Blondell and Mayo Methot, another actress, whom he married in 1938. Their escapades in assorted night spots and Bogart's drinking and brawling with his wife provided plenty of material for the gossip columnists. They were Bogart's Rat Pack of that day.

This was the period when Bogey was riding the reputation of his gangster roles, and he couldn't resist the temptation of playing the tough guy off screen, too. He was regularly referred to as "Battling Bogart" because of his tangles with people in bars. These were usually overstated. Bogart's bark was fiercer than his bite. His mouth—his tendency to braggadocio—was also bigger than his tendency to fight.

There is a funny story of the time he was propping up the bar at the Lakeside Country Club with a group of fellows, one of whom was a placid little chap whose name he hadn't caught. Bogart was boasting of what a fine physical specimen he was. "Hit me," he told the little fellow. "Hit me in the belly as hard as you can." The little fellow declined the invitation, but Bogart kept after him. "What's the matter?" he said, "scared of me? I won't hit you back." Whereupon the little fellow let him have it. Bogart folded up in a convulsive heap. The little fellow was Jimmy McLarnin, former welterweight champion of the world.

I recall, too, a time when I had written a sharp review of one of his films—I think it was his first independent production, Knock on Any Door. He was in New York when it opened, and he was evidently displeased with my review, because he told a friend of mine who happened to meet him at the bar of the "21" Club, "Tell that Crowther he'd better not come near me or I'll beat hell out of him." It happened that I did run into him a day or so later at the same bar. He was sourly uncordial, but all he threw at me was an injured look.

One of Bogart's pet antagonists was Jack L. Warner, head of the studio. They had frequent verbal battles over roles Warner wanted him to play. Bogart was several times suspended. There were threats and counterthreats of legal suits. But there is no record or recollection of Bogey ever taking a poke at Jack.

However, he did find an ingenious way of irritating him. It seems that Bogart developed a scalp condition that caused him to start losing hair, and Warner, concerned about the Bogey image, ordered him to wear a toupee at all times. Since there was nothing in his contract that compelled him to do such a thing, Bogart ignored the order. He made it a point, indeed, to be places where Warner could see him, his head bare and his bald spot showing clearly. This, though comparatively trivial, even in image-conscious Hollywood, was characteristic of his fractious and anti-authoritarian attitude.

Warner's concern for the Bogey image was interesting because the exploitation of him as a romantic figure was slow in developing. It was not until The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca that the studio began to sell him on the basis of his uncertain sex appeal. Before that he was considered a "man's actor" because of his predominantly gangster roles. Then, with Casablanca, he was touted as "that man with the divine lisp"—a reference to the minor speech impediment he had because of a scar on the under side of his upper lip.

Actually, Bogey's romantic activities are minimal in most of his films. They are more by implication and innuendo than by the evidence of sexy scenes. His attitude toward women is invariably casual and remote, and seldom does it spell out that he is really going to bed with a woman.

In The Maltese Falcon, for instance, he specifically avoids the woman who tries to hook him with sex. In Casablanca, the supposedly torrid love affair with Maria, played by beautiful Ingrid Bergman, is just so much talk between the two, some adoring looks on her part and considerable playing of "our song." The only love scene, in his Paris apartment, is purely conversational.

The common gripe of the women in Bogey's pictures is best indicated by the line Lauren Bacall speaks in To Have and Have Not, when she is embracing him for the first time and remarks, after some tentative osculation, "It's better when you help." Careful analysis of his sex encounters leads to the discovery that he never did help very much. There is a conspicuous diffusion of sex drive and energy in his films. You get the peculiar impression that Bogey would rather play chess.

This curious enervation of sex interest was also evident in Bogart's way of life. He seemed to derive most enjoyment from the company of men—hard-drinking, poker-playing fellows, which is the sort he was. The women he liked were the ones who could play poker and make jokes with the guys. He once remarked. of his coolness toward Gina Lollobrigida (with whom he made Beat the Devil). "I am not a bosom man."

Lauren Bacall, whom he met when they were doing To Have and Have Not in 1944 and married on May 20, 1945, when he was 45 and she 20, probably did more for him than any other woman. She made him stop drinking—drinking too much, that is. When he was married to Mayo Methot, they didn't do much but drink and fight. Often they had outright slug fests.

Baby was different. She was able to be one of the fellows in a more graceful, subtle way. She was also able to give him the security of feeling covered so far as his sex reputation was concerned. His urge to fulfill the masculine image that he had of himself was more insistent than his urge to fulfill the image he knew the fans had of him. Baby could beat up on him, without doing so literally. She also gave him two children, who were the proudest possessions of his life.

As the years settled down upon him, Bogart withdrew more and more into himself and the company of the few companions he felt were kindred spirits. He did a lot of sailing in his $55,000 yawl, the Santana (which is the name of the boat in Key Largo). He took some interest in politics, having been, all the time he was in Hollywood, one of the most outspoken of its unfashionable Democrats. He remained, as always, a real professional in his approach to his work. Directors and those who worked with him invariably remember him as the most punctilious and reliable performer they ever knew in Hollywood. He prided himself on being a "theater actor," which was his idea of tops.

Sammy Davis, who was a good friend in his last years, found that Bogart was a lone-wolf individual who lived by his own firm rules. He was, as Sammy says, a square shooter and he expected others to be square shooters, too. He acted with consideration and courtesy toward others and expected them to act the same toward him. He was not by nature a brawler. But the moment any body overstepped, he snapped them off harshly. He would willingly sign autographs. But just let a person—anybody—lay hands on him and he would stiffen and bark a familiar line from his pictures, "Take your hands off me!"

The legends of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack—the small group of intimates that included such as Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin. Shirley MacLaine, Judy Garland when she was going around with Sid Luft, Lauren Bacall (of course) and John Huston when he was in the vicinity (he was probably the most influential friend Bogart had)—were mostly the inventions of the gossip columnists, says Sammy, who was one of the gang. The name was merely Bogart's casual in-joke to identify his company of friends as distinct from a certain socially exclusive Hollywood tennis-racquet set.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who was not one of the Rat Pack but knew Bogart very well, feels the character Bogey plays in The Barefoot Contessa, made three years before he died, is a thorough summation of his nature and attitude in his last years. Bogey's Harry Dawes, the old Hollywood director and philosophical observer in this film, has no illusions about the sanctity of movies or the rewards of life. "How long," he asks, "do you suppose since we've said or done anything about ourselves that hasn't been said or done before? Or thought a new thought?" Yet Harry goes doggedly on.

Mankiewicz thinks that Bogart, like Harry, knew he had seen the whole show, had his fill of the phonies, tasted the sweets and the dregs. He was no longer wild and angry, just cynical and tired. Deep down, without wanting to say so, he was ready to die. Sure, he might have liked to live longer, sec his children grow up, belt a little more booze. But there were no more worlds for him to conquer, nothing more for him to say.

When it was first diagnosed that he had cancer of the throat, he refused to let the surgeons operate. Nor would he let them cut out his esophagus when he was told this was the only recourse that might possibly save his life. He endured many months of pain and torment, yet the few friends he was able to see said he faced the inevitable with tight-lipped courage. All he would say of his suffering was. "Pretty rough."

He died on January 14, 1957. It was the sort of ironic end that might have been written for one of Bogey's lonely, hard-luck characters. As Harry Dawes says in Contessa: "Life every now and then behaves as if it had seen too many bad movies, when it winds up in a pattern that's too pat, too neat. As it was in the beginning ... you fade out where you faded in."

(See the Bogart filmography and bibliography overleaf.)

"Here's looking at you, kid" the Bogart Boom

A Bogart Quiz

Half a hundred posers to test your expertise about the man and his movies

The current trivia craze—the nostalgic pop-culture parlor game popularized by Playboy in the "After Hours" pages of our February and April issues—invariably calls upon contestants to recall an arcane bit of memorabilia about the legendary Bogart. For the delectation of true Bogey buffs, we've contrived a contest devoted entirely to the laconic hero and his films—and calculated to separate the true cultist from the casual fan. If you get 20 or less correct, turn in your ticket stubs; you've flunked out. A respectable 21 to 30 right, however,qualifies you as a bona fide Bogey fan, junior grade. A score of 31 to 40 earns you both a bachelor's degree in Triviology and a charter membership in the Bogart Fan Club. But an impressive 41 to 50 right endows you with a lifetime chair—in the first row of the balcony—as Cullist Emeritus in Playboy's College of Insignificant Knowledge. Cribbers caught leading the Bosley Crowther and Kenneth Tynan articles before taking the quiz will be summarily expelled. And that goes double for those snitching peeks at the answers (on page 162) or at our Bogart Filmography (on page 166). If you need help, though, just whistle—for coaching from the side lines is not only permitted but encouraged.

1. What character did Bogart play in The Maltese Falcon?

2. In Casablanca, what actors took the parts of the waiter and the bartender?

3. In The Oklahoma Kid, who gave Bogart his comeuppance?

4. When and where was Bogart born? Were his parents poor, middle-income or well-to-do?

5. In what movie and to whom did Bogart say, "Here's looking at you, kid"?

6. In what two movies did Bob Steele play a crook gunned down by Bogart?

7. When did Bogart get his first public exposure?

8. Who played Bogart's disillusioned mother in Dead End?

9. What was the name of the hunted criminal Bogart played in High Sierra?

10. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, what actor tried to cut himself in on the gold strike?

11. In what picture did Bogart and Bacall first co-star? How many other films did they make together? Name them.

12. What was the scent that haunted Bogart in Dead Reckoning?

13. In Key Largo, how many mobsters in the getaway boat did Bogart kill?

14. What characters were played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in Casablanca? In The Maltese Falcon?

15. What college did Bogart attend?

16. Who was Pard?

17. Who played Sydney Greenstreet's gunsel in The Maltese Falcon?

18. Whom did Bogart portray in The African Queen?

19. In The Big Sleep, what was the name of the gangster whom Bogart managed to have killed by his own torpedoes?

20. In the same film, why was Bogart soaked with perspiration after his first meeting with his client?

21. In what picture did Bacall tell Bogart, "If you want anything, all you have to do is whistle"?

22. What did Bogart say to Sydney Greenstreet when Greenstreet showed him his gun in Across the Pacific?

23. Where did To Have and Have Not take place?

24. What was the name of Bogart's secretary in The Maltese Falcon?

25. In Sahara, what deal did Bogart offer the German commander?

26. What was Bogart's first picture? In what year was it made? Was this his show-business debut as an actor?

27. What night clubs were owned by Bogart and Greenstreet in Casablanca?

28. In Dead Reckoning, how did Bogart force a hood to jump out of an office window to his death?

29. On what lake did Bogart and Katharine Hepburn encounter a German warship in The African Queen?

30. In All Through the Night, who portrayed the head Nazi spy—and the monocled German officer in Casablanca?

31. Whose singing voice was dubbed for Lauren Bacall's in To Have and Have Not?

32. How did Bogart get the scar on his upper lip?

33. Who played the Chinese war lord who hired Bogart in The Left Hand of God?

34. In that movie, who fell in love with Bogart?

35. What was Bogart's nervous habit in The Caine Mutiny?

36. In the same film, who relieved Bogart of command?

37. When did Bogart marry Bacall?

38. In The Petrified Forest, why did Leslie Howard want Bogart to kill him?

39. What was the name of the character immortalized by Bogart in that film?

40. What was the only picture Bogart made with Gina Lollobrigida?

41. How many times was Bogart married B.B. (Before Bacall), and to whom?

42. In Sabrina, what was the name of the character Bogart played? Who played his brother, David?

43. Who played the old prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre? Who played the young one?

44. What was the name of the homicidal snake in We're No Angels?

45. What were Bogart's closing words in Casablanca?

46. In what picture did Bogart take the part of a district attorney out to bust a vice gang? In what picture did he play an assistant district attorney out to bust a murder gang?

47. How many children did Bogart have? By whom? What are their names?

48. Who was Bogart's girlfriend in Across the Pacific and The Maltese Falcon?

49. What was Bogart's middle name?

50. What was Bogart's last film, and what character did he play in it?

Answers to Bogart Quiz on page. 112

(1) Sam Spade. (2) S. Z. "Cuddles" Sakall and Leonid Kinsky. (3) James Cagney, playing the Kid, Jim Kincaid. (4) His birth certificate, on file at Sloan's Maternity Hospital in New York City, reads December 25, 1899. Well-to-do: His father was a prominent surgeon. (5) "Casablanca." Ingrid Bergman. (6) "The Big Sleep" and "The Enforcer." (7) At age seven weeks, when he posed as a model for his mother, a noted illustrator, in a series of baby-food ads. (8) Marjorie Main. (9) "Mad Dog" Earl. (10) Bruce Bennett. (11) "To Have and Have Not." Three: "The Big Sleep," "Dark Passage," "Key Largo." (12) Jasmine. (13) Three—a fourth was shot by Edward G. Robinson. (14) Farrari and Ugarte. Gutman and Cairo. (15) None; he was privately educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a preparatory school, but he flunked, out and didn't go on to college. (16) The dog Bogart and Ida Lupino became attached to in "High Sierra." (17) Elisha Cook, Jr. (18) Charlie Allnut. (19) Eddie Mars. (20) The interview look place in a hothouse. (21) "To Have and Have Not"; he had the line inscribed on a gold whistle he later gave to her. (22) "Mine's bigger than yours." (23) Martinique. (24) Effie. (25) To trade a cup of water for each German rifle. (26) "Broadway's Like That"; 1930; no, he had appeared in 11 plays on Broadway. (27) Rick's Café Américain and The Blue Parrot, respectively. (28) He surrounded him with a fire started by a creeping-jelly grenade. (29) Lake Victoria, in British East Africa. (30) Conrad veidt. (31) Andy Williams'. (32) As a sailor during World War One, he was injured by a wood splinter in an accident aboard a troopship in the Atlantic. (33) Lee J. Cobb. (34) Gene Tierney. (35) As Captain Queeg, he rolled steel balls in his hands. (36) Van Johnson, playing Maryk. (37) 1945. (38) So that Bette Davis could collect on his insurance policy. (39) Duke Mantee. (40) "Beat the Devil." (41) Three times—to Helen Menken, Mary Phillips and Mayo Methot, all actresses. (42) Linus Larrabee; William Holden. (43) Walter Huston; Tim Holt. (44) Adolph. (45) "You know, Louie, this could be the. start of a beautiful friendshi.p." (46) "Marked Woman." "The Enforcer." (47) Two; Bacall; Leslie Howard and Stephen Humphrey. (48) Mary Astor. (49) DeForest. (50) "The Harder They Fall"; Eddie Willis.