The Man and the Myth

First, the confession. Unlike most journalists, I never got drunk with Humphrey Bogart. I met him only once, at a Mayfair club in 1952, when I had just described his face in print as "a triumph of plastic surgery." He called me over to his table, where he was studiously noisy and three parts crocked. We did not love each other at sight, though I happily submitted to what John Crosby once described to me as "that basilisk authority of his." He overawed me because he was rich and raucous and because he ate nothing. He looked like "a great famished wolf," which is how Ellen Terry summed up Sir Henry Irving's performance as Macbeth. I decided later that I preferred the lines his scriptwriters gave him to the ones he ad-libbed that night.

I have now read about 83 accounts of him, in magazines or books, and I still cannot find it in me to be mesmerized by Bogart the Man. Successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can't act frequently express the same opinions as successful hard-drinking iconoclasts who can (such as Bogart). To hate phonies and prize loyalty is a fairly common attribute, even among the untalented. And on every other page of the Bogart dossiers there are tributes from colleagues that bring me out in a sweat of incredulous embarrassment. My favorite comes from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, according to whom: "He had a kind of 18th Century, Alexander Pope nature." Alexander Pope was a cripple who wrote heroic couplets. There's an 18th Century novel called Humphrey Clinker: possibly Mankiewicz had got his Humphreys confused.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about Bogart's hagiographers is their failure to agree on basic items of information, beginning with the date of his birth. Ezra (Bogey: The Good-Bad Guy) Goodman says it was Christmas Day, 1899. Clifford (Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart) McCarty loftily dismisses this as a studio myth, and plumps instead for January 23, 1899; while in Bogey: The Man, the Actor, the Legend, Jonah Ruddy and Jonathan Hill put their money on December 25, 1900. Similarly, no one seems quite sure how Bogart acquired the scar on his upper lip. One account explains that during his naval service in World War One he was bashed in the face by the handcuffs of a bad-tempered prisoner he was escorting. Another, rather more heroically, insists that the injury came from a splinter of wood, dislodged by an exploding shell.

Writing about his apprenticeship on Broadway in the Twenties, Ruddy and Hill claim that he was "the originator of that famous (continued on page 168)Kenneth Tynan(continued from page 111) theatrical line—'Tennis, anyone?' " In the Goodman version. Bogart denies that he ever uttered it. From Alistair Cooke in The Atlantic Monthly, we learn that he popularized the phrase: "Drop the gun, Louie." Goodman's Bogart is quite categorical: "I never said 'Drop the gun, Louie.' " Of all the biographers, Ezra Goodman the Man comes across least adorably in print. He got much of his background material while interviewing Bogart in what is shallowly known as depth for a Time magazine cover story in the 1950s. His approach to his subject, alternately sneering and cringing, recalls a famous remark of Max Beerbohm's. A tailor had written to the great essayist, demanding immediate payment in tones that reeked of servility. "My dear sir," Beerbohm replied, "kindly cease from crawling on your knees and shaking your fist."

Most of the Bogart buffs are content to contradict one another: Goodman breaks new ground by contradicting himself. On page 61 he quotes Bogart as follows:

"In John Huston's house, years ago, a group of us played touch football in the living room with a grapefruit. It was high spirits. There were Collier Young, Charley Grayson, John Huston and myself. After the first scrimmage in the second game, I got on the side of the big guy whom I had been opposed to. He played real football. It was exercise, shall we say."

On page 170, the same incident reappears in a less innocent light, shall we say. It is now an outdoor event, with a cast augmented by the director Richard Brooks. This is Brooks' story:

"There was a fine actress ... whose husband nobody could stand. John Huston said: 'Let's jump him.' Instead, we decided to get a football game rolling.... We got a grapefruit off a tree. Bogey goes on the husband's side with Collier Young (a producer). John and I are on the other side. It's two against three. Together John and I tackled the husband with the grapefruit. Bogey switches sides to join us. Now it's the three of us against Collier Young and the husband. Then Collier Young switches sides and the four of us hit him. We were all wearing tuxedos and we were playing in the mud."

John Crosby, formerly of the New York Herald Tribune and now with the London Observer, is one of the few journalists who knew Bogart well. He was and remains an unswerving admirer of Bogart the Man. "Off screen," he told me, "Bogart didn't diminish, which is more than you can say of most movie stars. He was a drinker, but never a wencher. And although he loathed gossip columnists, he liked real newspapermen. Some of us used to meet at a place called Bleeck's on West 40th Street. The sign outside read: Bleeck's Writers and Artists Tavern and Foremerly Club. We called ourselves the Formerly Club, and Bogart was an honorary member whenever he was in New York. If he was buying me a drink, he wouldn't just pass it across—he'd take me by the wrist and screw the glass into my hand as if it was a lamp socket. He'd seen Osgood Perkins—Tony's father—do that in some Broadway comedy in the Twenties. Another thing about Bogey: He never went around with hoods and bums. That's pure legend. He was an upper-class boy, and if Jock Whitney or Vincent Astor were giving a party, he'd be there."

On one point all the biographies agree: that Bogart's physical courage, in the long months of wasting and waiting before cancer finally took his life in January 1957, was tremendous and exemplary. But there are more kinds of courage than one, and it could be argued that Bogart, ten years earlier, had laid himself open to the charge of moral cowardice. In a chartered plane full of movie notables, he flew to Washington to protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had subpoenaed many Hollywood writers, actors and directors to testify to their political affiliations. In the early hearings, several of the witnesses took the Fifth Amendment when asked whether they were (or had ever been) members of the Communist Party. Ten of them—the so-called Hollywood Ten—were subsequently held in contempt of Congress and imprisoned. Bogart promptly issued a statement in which he said that his trip to Washington had been "ill-advised, foolish and impetuous." No doubt he was upset to find that some of his fellow travelers were in fact fellow travelers, or at any rate holders of views pinker than his own. Whether he should have withdrawn his support quite so publicly and abjectly is another matter. "Never rat on a rat" was the slogan of the Holmby Hills Rat Pack. For once in his life, Bogart exposed himself to the taunt of being a fink.

• • •

If I seem to knock the cult of Bogart the Man, it is because I invented the cult of Bogart the Actor. Not the glib Broadway juvenile who went to Hollywood in 1930 and made nine pictures impressing no one, but the sardonic, close-cropped bandit who flew back to the Coast in 1936 to play Duke Mantee in The Petrified forest. Aged ten, I saw die film when it opened in Britain, and immediately wrote a letter to a movie magazine, begging Warner's to give us more of this untamed man with the warning eyes and the rasping voice. It was my debut in print. Between 1936 and 1941 Warner's heeded my plea in spades; Bogart made 28 films, of which I missed very few.

Already the critics were getting him wrong, as they have ever since. They all said he lisped, whereas I, who could mimic him perfectly, knew that he did nothing of the sort. What he did was to fork his tongue and hiss like a snake. This was new, and so was the sheer bravura of his decision to use his own name. Like all good fans, my schoolmates and I had long been aware that Robert Taylor was Spangler Arlington Brugh, and we wouldn't have been surprised to learn that John Wayne was the pseudonym of Adrian Mumchance III. But Bogart had actually been christened Humphrey DeForest Bogart: which impressed us, because—in Britain, at least—Humphrey was a name with strong associations of pompousuess and/or faggotry. We respected Bogart for having the guts to live with it. To us, a heavy named Humphrey was about as bizarre as a flutist named Bugsy.

At that time, the king thug on the Warner lot was Edward G. Robinson, wearing vast lapels like the swept-back wings of a jet. Bogart, lean and hungry, was Cassius to his Caesar. We rooted for Bogart because, although he got second billing, he never said "Yes, boss" as if he meant it. He was nobody's man but his own. And this extended to his relationship with the audience. You had to take him on his own terms. He never stooped to ingratiation, and though his bullying was silken, it was also icy. In latter-day terminology, he was "inner-directed," steering by a private compass that paid no attention to storm signals from outside. Moreover, if the needle led him (as it usually did) into a hail of bullets, he would die with a shrug: no complaints, no apologies, no hard feelings. Indeed, he rarely displayed strong feelings of any kind. And this, in an age when stars were supposed to emote and be vibrant, was something else we admired. It reflected, in part, the emotional tact of a man who seemed genuinely repelled by sentimentality; and, in part, die professional assurance of an actor who knew damned well that he could get along without it. Either way, it was revolutionary, and we relished it.

The year 1937 was full of vintage Bogart: Turkey Morgan in Kid Galahad and—supreme misnomer—Baby Face Martin in William Wyler's Dead End, the first of the mother-fixated gangsters, who announced his presence (if memory serves) by flipping a knife into the tree trunk around which Leo Gorcey and his chums were huddled. That was the year we all started wincing, as Bogart did when engaged in any mild form of physical exertion, like loading a gun. To wince correctly, you had to imagine that your upper lip was split, and then try to smile. (We used to wince while filling our fountain pens.) I've sometimes wondered how much of Bogart's appeal in England was due to the fact that he was the first movie hero who literally had a stiff upper lip.

Less propitiously, 1937 was the year of Marked Woman, starring Bette Davis, in which Bogart appeared as David Graham, the crusading district attorney. The opinion in my set was unanimous. The film proved not only that Bogart was a rotten D. A. (he gave an equally flat rendering of a similar role in The Enforcer, 14 years later), but that he could never, in any circumstances, play a character named David Graham. Another blotch on Marked Woman was that it gave us our first glimpse of Mayo Methot. soon to become Bogart's third wife. (She was the brawling one, subsequently renowned as a zealous fan of General MacArthur and a dead shot with a highball glass across a crowded room.) We disliked her on sight and sent her anonymous letters, pointing out that she was something of a pig and that Bogart deserved better. We all knew—or hindsight tells me we did—that the better girl would be a lean, nonchalant baritone, like himself. But she didn't turn up until 1945, when he made To Have and Have Not and whistled for her.

The great Bogart-Cagney confrontation was held in 1938—1939. It spanned three movies. I missed the second, a Western called The Oklahoma Kid, but the key encounters—the eyeball-to-eyeball stuff—took place in the other two: Michael Curtiz' Angels with Dirty Faces and Raoul Walsh's The Roaring Twenties. James Cagney was the spruce, ebullient urchin who killed with Irish charm and died in dogged, tenacious spasms of life-loving energy. Ever since Public Enemy, in 1931, he had been Hollywood's most dynamic and disarming hood. Murder, as he committed it, seemed like a high-spirited exercise, performed out of pure exuberance. He made vice look spunky and debonair, even funny. No one who saw him in the late Thirties will ever forget the grace of his spring-heeled walk and the rich, elated derision of his voice. Bogart was five years older than Cagney when Warner's sent him into the ring with their most triumphant romantic outlaw. It's easy, when surveying Bogart's career, to overlook the basic fact of his age. He didn't become a star until his late 30s, by which time most aspirants have given up and settled for character parts.

Bogart countered Cagney's agile footwork with unruffled expertise. He was like a laconic Hemingway hero up against Studs Lonigan. Often he out-stared Cagney, so shrewdly and mockingly that he looked like a walking ad for that essential Hemingway prop, the built-in shit detector. The contrast of styles was beautiful to watch. It was Bogart the wily debunker versus Cagney the exultant cavalier. With every punch Cagney threw, Bogart lazily rode. Long afterward I wrote: "Each had perfected his own version of the fanged killer's smile, and a good deal of The Roaring Twenties developed into a sort of grinning contest." The verdict, on points, went to Bogart's sewage snarl.

Thus far, Bogart's main achievement was to have played George Raft parts better than George Raft had ever played them, and better than Alan Ladd was ever going to play them. There was a significant change in 1941, a subtle modulation that led his career out of what might have been a blind alley. Between 1929 and 1932, in a sudden and strenuous burst of creativity, Dashiell Hammett had written five novels. He never wrote another, nor did he need to: The existing quintet was enough to ensure him a modest but durable niche in American literature. One of mem, The Thin Man, had been filmed, and so sweetened in the filming that it spawned a series, starring William Powell, Myrna Loy and a lovable dog.

Another, The Maltese Falcon, had been waiting on the shelf for the advent of someone like Bogart, who could show the world what Hammett was really about. The Hammett private eye was the first antihero. No Batman he: Operating in a corrupt society, he was not above using corrupt means. He was a cynic to whom nothing human, however squalid, was alien; a man soured but still amused by the intricate depravity of his fellow creatures; and he could, on occasion, be extremely brutal. In short, he was virtually indistinguishable from the Bogart gangster in every respect but one: He was on the side of the law. From now on Bogart could be ruthless—he could even kill—with no loss of glamor and every appearance of moral rectitide. He could engage in mayhem and emerge untarnished. Still as fascinating as ever, he was no longer reprehensible. This farewell to overt criminality was what enabled Bogart to become a world star and a household god.

Bogart's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon set the pattern for his maturity, and for my adolescence. With the same director (John Huston) and the same supporting team (including Mary Astor and Sydney Greenstreet), he played a similar role in Across the Pacific, this time working for the Government as an undercover agent. Later, in 1946, we saw him as Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler's savagely disenchanted outlaw-within-the-law, in The Big Sleep. But it was Hammett who fixed and defined the Bogart figure: It all began with Sam.

He looked battered before anything had happened, as if survival at an honorable wage was all he hoped for. There was a dimple on each cheekbone, but you would be unwise to call him cute. He wore his hangover like a long-service medal, and his voice, metallic and nasal, was that of a martyr to drinker's catarrh. You could imagine him demanding a pre-breakfast vodka to cut the phlegm. He was always unsurprised. Wherever he went, you felt that he had been there before and learned nothing he did not already know. Greeting an attractive female customer, he would eye her frankly from shoes to chignon, like the lawyer in Thurber's cartoon who murmurs: "You're not my client, you're my meat, Mrs. Fisk." And if he took her to bed, that would be that. You could count on the Bogart figure never to utter either of the lines on which romantic melodrama depends: "I love you" and "I hate you." He resisted commitment of this or any other kind. One of his most characteristic moments occurred in Passage to Marseille (1944). Playing a Free French journalist, he is asked to declare his nationality. "Eskimo," he replies, not batting an eyelid.

The wartime Bogart was mostly a soldier of fortune, typified by Rick in Casablanca (1943), the erstwhile idealist who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War but now refuses to stick his neck out. Since civilization is crumbling, he finally abandons his detachment and takes sides. After Bogart's death, Alistair Cooke said that he was "the romantic democratic answer to Hitler's New Order.... He is the first romantic hero who used the gangster's means to achieve our ends." According to this thesis, we trusted Bogart because he looked deadly enough to face the Nazis and come out on top. But I wonder. Bogart's great money-making years were the late Forties and early Fifties, and it wasn't until 1954 that Nunnally Johnson singled him out as the only star whose name could go over the title of a movie.

I suspect that the Bogart cult in its present form—classless and international—dates from the Cold War. We trusted him because he was a wary loner who belonged to nobody, had personal honor (that virtue which, as Bernard Shaw once said, is nowhere mentioned in the Bible), and would therefore survive. Compared with many of his Hollywood colleagues, he seemed an island of integrity, not perhaps very lovable but at least unbought. His film persona was that of a man for whom patriotism was something, but not nearly enough. He was a neutralist at large in Beverly Hills.

In these later years his face, with its slanting planes and wry indentations, had become as complex as a Cubist portrait. As he approached the last of 75 feature films, the highbrows adopted him, most possessively in France. (Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, made in 1960, is a tribute to the Bogart way of life.) I admired him in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen, but the former was Walter Huston's picture and the latter Katharine Hepburn's; and anyway, I always preferred Bogart indoors. His habitat was the city, not the plain. I don't think we can say he was a great actor, but he remained, to the end, a great behaver. Without effort, and with classic economy, he could transfer the essence of himself to a camera and be sure that it would be eloquent on a screen.

And what was that essence? I trace it back to the Roman playwright Seneca, of whom Bogart might very well never have heard. He flourished in the First Century A.D. and wrote violent tragedies that had an enormous influence on Shakespeare and many other Elizabethan dramatists. (T. S. Eliot composed a celebrated essay about his effect on English literature.) What he preached and put into his plays was the philosophy known as Stoicism. It meant: Accept the fact of transience, don't panic in the face of mortality, learn to live with death.

This sums up the Bogart stance. Soon after he died, I reread the letters that Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius. Certain passages in them seemed to echo and epitomize what I had thought about Bogart during his lifetime. The poet-philosopher might have been writing additional dialog for the actor's persona. "What is freedom, say you? To be the slave of nothing, of no necessity, of no accident, and to make fortune face you on the level." Therefore, live close to trouble and care nothing. Live outrageously, if you can carry it off. I remember Richard Burton's story of how he and Bogart were among the guests at a toplevel Bel Air party in honor of a visiting foreign diplomat. Bogart, who had been warned in advance to watch his language, sat black-tied and tongue-tied until dinner was over, when he turned to the visitor and said: "You speak very good English." "Thank you," said the diplomat, "I had an English governess." Bogart nodded. Then, with no change of expression: "Did you rape her?" he asked civilly, in tones of polite interest.

"Life's like a play," Seneca tells his friend, "it's not the length but the excellence of the acting that counts. Where you stop isn't important.... To die soon or die late matters nothing; to die badly or die well is the important point." Bogart was always dying. It was the thing he knew most about. "In my first thirty-four pictures," runs a famous quote, "I was shot in twelve, and electrocuted or hanged in eight ..." "If a man dies as unconcernedly as he is born," Seneca continues, "he has learned wisdom." People came to see Bogart die, because he did it with such model nonchalance. Raoul Walsh (who directed Bogart in High Sierra) knew what was happening when he said: "You can't kill Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck in a picture. But you can kill off Bogart. The audience doesn't resent it."

Back to Seneca: "This is the moment on which you've been cast. You may perhaps prolong it, but how far? ... Death's one of the obligations of life." Yet how stunned we were when Bogart finally fulfilled it. We had watched Bogart die so often, had seen him so regularly sacrificed on the altar of the motion-picture code, that we had come to think of him as indestructible. There would always, surely, be another Bogart movie, in which he would be killed again.

"We're wrong in looking forward to death." says Seneca, "in great measure, it's past already. Death is master of all the years that are behind us." And Bogart's voice told us as much. Even in the most flippant context, it carried with it a bass note of mortality. The voice was his key attribute, the feature by which we recognized him; and it was cruelly appropriate that when cancer singled him out, it went for his throat.

"Everything's in other hands, Lucilius; time alone is ours." That would have made a nice encore for Sam. Let it stand as an epitaph for Bogart.

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