Humphrey Bogart spent the final 21 years of his life laboriously changing the established character of a middle-aged man from that of a standard, well-bred theatre actor named Humphrey to that which complemented his movie roles – a rebellious robust generally known as Bogey. Within the ten years since his demise in 1957, with no extra effort than it takes to sort the comic-strip dream of just a little boy’s hero, biographers catering to the Bogey Cult have remodeled him right into a cinematic saint, in whom I can discover scarcely a hint of the Humphrey I first knew in 1924 or the Bogey I final noticed in 1943.
The youngest strokes within the portrait of St. Bogart are these which paint him as a ‘loner’, a person of ‘self dedication’ who makes ‘all his personal selections’ with regard for nothing past fast satisfaction. Such an outline would possibly do for a fourth century St. Anthony of the Egyptian desert, however by no means for a twentieth century movie star in Hollywood.
Being myself a born loner who was quickly deflected from the hermit path by a profession within the theatre and movies, I can state categorically that in Bogart’s time there was no different occupation on this planet that so intently resembled enslavement because the profession of a movie star. He had self-determination solely on this: he would possibly or he won’t signal a movie contract. If he signed the contract he turned topic to those that paid his wage and launched his movies. If he didn’t signal the contract, he was no movie star.
I, for instance, after I was beneath contract to Paramount in 1928, complained about being pressured to hold round Hollywood ready to make some movie. “That’s what we’re paying you for,” was the cruel remark of the entrance workplace, “your time.” “You imply my life,” I amended to myself.
This function initially ran in our Winter 1966/67 problem
When the approaching of talkies made the slicing of actors’ salaries practicable and I used to be the one one on the lot who refused to take a lower and thereby misplaced my contract, I doubted that such ‘uncooperative’ selections would lengthen my profession. Once I was the one one of many forged who refused to return to make the talkie model of my final silent movie there, The Canary Homicide Case, the studio doused me with ugly publicity and made my doubts a certainty.
In later years at Warner Brothers, when Bogart, following the lead of James Cagney and Errol Flynn, would go on strike, braying for higher movies and extra money, the studio made a nice recreation of it. The actors had been allowed a triumphant interval wherein to really feel like lords of the lot; the publicity stirred up by these mock battles was free and helpful; and an excessive amount of cash was saved whereas the actors’ salaries had been suspended. Studio contracts had been all the time a joke, anyhow, so far as actors had been involved. Studios might break them at will; the actors had been certain by their concern of impoverishing legislation fits and everlasting unemployment.
As a loner, my two most valuable rights are these which permit me to decide on the intervals of my aloneness and to decide on the individuals with whom I’ll spend the intervals of my not-aloneness. To be not to mention for an on the spot is terrifying to a movie star. It’s the first signpost resulting in oblivion. Clearly an actor can not select the individuals with whom he’ll work, or when or how he’ll work with them. He goes to work at a time specified by the studio. He spends his working day not solely beneath the management of his director, but in addition of the scriptwriter, the cameraman, the wardrobe division, and the publicity workplace.
Since publicity is the life-blood of stardom with out which a star will die, it’s equally apparent that he should maintain it flowing by his non-public life which feeds the envy and curiosity that convey many individuals into theatres. Having rightly ascribed a lot of his earlier failure within the theatre and movies to an absence of publicity worth, from the second Bogart settled at Warner Brothers in 1936, all his time not spent earlier than the digicam was spent with journalists and columnists who invented for him the non-public character of Bogey. They carved him into the specified peg upon which they might grasp their favorite historical gags and bar-room fables. A small a part of Bogey’s character was based on his movie roles; the larger half was based on the pranks of these rats of the underworld idolised by the ex-columnist, producer Mark Hellinger. Over the last ten years of his life, pushed by his ferocious ambition, Humphrey Bogart allowed himself to be fashioned into a rough and drunken bully, a puppet Iago who fomented evil with no motive.
In 1924 my first impression of Humphrey Bogart was of a slim boy with charming manners, who was terribly quiet for an actor. His good-looking face was made extraordinary by a most lovely mouth. It was very full, rosy, and completely modelled. To make it utterly fascinating, at one nook of his higher lip a scarred quilted piece hung down in a tiny scallop.
When Humphrey went into movies, a surgeon sewed up the scallop. Photographically it was an enchancment, however I missed this endearing disfigurement. The scar on his lip has since grow to be an emblem of his heroism. In these early years it was taken with no consideration that he obtained punched within the mouth at some speakeasy. When Humphrey drank he turned exhausted and infrequently fell asleep (as in Casablanca) together with his head in his arms on the desk. If rudely shaken awake he would say one thing impolite and typically obtained socked for it. On this event he purposely didn’t get his cut up lip sewed up as a result of he each liked and hated his lovely mouth. America, within the Twenties, was solely Western in its concepts of magnificence and vulgar individuals made enjoyable of Humphrey’s ‘nigger lips’.
The lip wound gave him no speech obstacle both earlier than or after it was mended. However when he ultimately made successful in movies, observing how a lot an uncommon function, akin to Clark Gable’s distinguished ears, added to the publicity worth of a star, he determined to take advantage of his mouth. Through the years Bogey practised all types of lip gymnastics accompanied by nasal tones, snarls, lisps, and slurs. His painful wince, his leer, his fiendish grin had been probably the most achieved ever seen on movie. Solely Erich von Stroheim was his grasp in lip-twitching.
However in 1924 Humphrey was talking his traces with a well-projected baritone and good diction in a small half in a play in New York known as Nerves. Mary Phillips additionally had a small half in Nerves. Kenneth MacKenna performed a number one position. The play would have been an excellent deal extra nervous had they identified that after Humphrey was married and divorced by Helen Menken he would marry Mary Phillips; and that after Kenneth was married and divorced by Kay Francis he would marry Mary Phillips who had divorced Humphrey.
With a view to future entanglements, the theatrical season of 1925-26 was much more intriguing. James Cagney, who was to grow to be Humphrey’s red-headed bête noire at Warner Brothers, was taking part in in Outdoors Wanting In; Leslie Howard, who was to place Humphrey ready to rival Cagney, was taking part in in The Inexperienced Hat; Helen Menken, in Makropoulos Secret; Mary Phillips, in The Knowledge Tooth; and spouse quantity three, Mayo Methot, in Alias the Deacon. In The Cradle Snatchers, Humphrey was taking part in a school boy being snatched by middle-aged Mary Boland, whereas off stage within the Bronx the year-old Lauren Bacall lay in her cradle ready for Bogey to grab her 20 years later as spouse quantity 4.
Bogart and James Cagney in The Roaring Twenties (1939)
Dismissing Humphrey’s theatrical profession with a press discover loses a lot of its level when the info are examined. From the season 1921-22 when he first appeared on Broadway with Alice Brady in Drifting, by the season 1929-30 when he obtained his first Hollywood contract, 2,044 performs had been produced in New York. Out of a doable two thousand younger American dramatic actors working in these performs, solely 4 in addition to Bogart turned main movie stars – Cagney, Tracy, Fredric March and Clark Gable. As a result of, whether or not or not they confess it as frankly as Barbra Streisand who stated, “To me being actually well-known is being a film star,” that’s the purpose of all actors within the theatre.
In 1930 Humphrey’s Hollywood failure was as predictable as was Cagney’s success. Cagney’s character was already a gaudy perfection within the theatre. In Penny Arcade, the play that gained him his movie contract with Warner Brothers, Jimmie appeared as the identical little hoodlum killer that made him well-known in movies.
Bogart was chosen out of It’s a Sensible Baby, wherein he performed a gentlemanly younger cad with solely his beauty to suggest him to Hollywood producers, who had been by no means impressed in casting an actor who had not but established his personal characterisation. Writers who by no means noticed him on the stage can not uncover the bitterness in Bogey’s ‘favorite’ evaluate by Alexander Woollcott, who described his efficiency in Swifty as “insufficient”. To be talked about in any respect in any evaluate amounted to reward for Bogart. On the stage he was as formless as an impression misplaced by lack of meditation, as blurred as a reputation inked on blotting paper.
Within the 20s, beneath the supervision of outdated producers like David Belasco, stage path dated again to the feverish strategy of the English theatre earlier than the performs of Ibsen, Chekhov and Bernard Shaw revolutionised it, introducing what Lytton Strachey known as “a brand new quiet and refined fashion of appearing – a prose fashion.” In New York we started to grasp how dangerous had been our administrators and actors when English stars started to appear on Broadway. There was Lynn Fontanne in Pygmalion, Roland Younger in The Final of Mrs. Cheyney, Leslie Howard in Berkeley Sq. and Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward in Personal Lives. These marvellous actors of realism spoke their traces as if that they had simply considered them. They moved in regards to the stage with ease.
And so they really paid consideration too – they really heard what different actors had been saying. The traditional Broadway method uncovered extra showing-off than appearing, extra of a battle than a play. Each actor’s purpose was to kill the opposite actors’ traces, particularly if the traces provoked laughter. Ina Claire was celebrated for waving a big chiffon handkerchief on different actors’ traces and forcing them to work with their backs to the viewers. Removed from being criticised, she was envied for such tips.
Bogart (proper) with Leslie Howard, Bette Davis and Porter Corridor in The Petrified Forest (1936)
After 13 years of conditioning to this type of ‘stage’ appearing, when Bogart obtained a job in The Petrified Forest, which opened in January 1935, nothing however looking ambition might have enabled him to see in Leslie Howard’s quiet, pure appearing method a mode he might adapt to his personal character. Nothing however rigid will-power might have enabled him to tear down his ingrained appearing habits with a view to start once more the self-conscious agony of studying to behave.
Working with Leslie gave him command of the Duke Mantee half within the play and within the movie; however the movies of the next 5 years reveal the horrible battle for supremacy engaged in by the brand new Bogey method with the outdated theatrical habits of Humphrey. With a poor director, Frank McDonald, in The Isle of Fury he was Humphrey once more, reciting his memorised traces, hanging attitudes whereas he waited for the opposite actors to get executed with theirs. In Darkish Victory, working with a terrific director, Edmund Goulding, who was additionally a terrific clown, appearing with the emotional Bette Davis who might fireplace up on the phrase ‘digicam’, he was stricken with grotesque, newbie embarrassment.
In contrast to most technical actors, Humphrey was extraordinarily delicate to his director. However like most actors from the theatre, he was sluggish in constructing a temper and grimly critical about sustaining it. James Cagney, in The Roaring Twenties, cut up him in a confusion between Bogey and Humphrey. Cagney’s swift dialogue and his swift actions, which had the glitter and precision of a meat slicer, had been unimaginable to anticipate or counter-attack. Humphrey was at his finest working with much less impressed and extra technical actors akin to Walter Huston.
He was additionally at his finest taking part in an inarticulate, uncomplicated character just like the punk in San Quentin. His mindless pursuit of demise turned pathetic, even noble, as a result of it got here out of his personal unconquerable perseverance in pursuing stardom. In The Maltese Falcon his half was uncomplicated, however an excessive amount of dialogue betrayed the truth that his depressing theatrical coaching had left him completely afraid of phrases. In brief speeches he cleverly masked his concern together with his tips of mouth and voice. However when he was allotted a part of the burden of exposition on this movie, his eyes glazed and invisible cartoon balloons circled his dialogue. Extra unlucky had been his efforts at repartee with Mary Astor in Throughout the Pacific.
Bogart with Bette Davis in Darkish Victory (1939)
In his final movies, it was not the theatre Humphrey who overcame Bogey, however the actual man, Humphrey Bogart, whose elementary inertia had all the time menaced his profession. As a lifeless soul ready for launch in demise in The Determined Hours, he was incomparable till, unaccountably, a sentimental coronary heart started to beat, and he handed over the movie to Fredric March.
Nevertheless, earlier than inertia set in, he performed one fascinatingly advanced character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray, in a movie whose title completely outlined Humphrey’s personal isolation amongst individuals. In a Lonely Place gave him a job that he might play with complexity as a result of the movie character’s, the screenwriter’s, delight in his artwork, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of vitality stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, had been shared equally by the actual Bogart.
In his preface to The Physician’s Dilemma, Bernard Shaw wrote: “No man who’s occupied in doing a really tough factor, and doing it very nicely, ever loses his self respect. The widespread man could must discovered his self-respect on sobriety, honesty and trade; however an artist wants no such props for his sense of dignity… The reality is, hardly any of us have vitality sufficient for a couple of actually rigid level of honour. An actor, a painter, a composer, an creator, could also be as egocentric as he likes with out reproach from the general public if solely his artwork is great; and he can not fulfil this situation with out adequate effort and sacrifice to make him really feel noble and martyred regardless of his selfishness.”
Gloria Grahame and Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950)
Superficially, Humphrey’s character and lifestyle so little resembled that of the safe and temperate Leslie Howard that what induced Leslie to grow to be his information and champion just isn’t instantly obvious. I, myself, would by no means have identified the rationale for his sympathetic perspective in the direction of Humphrey had I not met Leslie in New York in November 1931 when he was rehearsing his new play, The Animal Kingdom.
It was on the afternoon of my twenty fifth birthday that George Marshall (not the director however the proprietor of the skilled soccer crew, the Washington Redskins) introduced that he was going to have fun the occasion by taking me to dinner on the On line casino within the Park with Leslie Howard and his spouse. I used to be shocked and happy, not solely as a result of George was mad at me for turning down a suggestion to work for RKO in Hollywood, but in addition as a result of he so little preferred spending pointless cash on me that the final time I spoke to him on the ‘cellphone in 1960, he was nonetheless questioning why he had given me a mink coat in 1928.
Conversationally, the banquet was not nicely balanced. Once I was with George I stated little, fearing that I’d give him materials for an enquiry into how I spent my time when he was away in Washington. Leslie, who had evidently accepted the invitation as a result of he loved George’s performances, stated nothing. Mrs. Howard, a big lady who appeared extra like his mom than his spouse, tried to inject gracious remarks right here and there within the stream of George’s witty tales, however his loud voice was as exhausting on them because it was on Eddie Duchin’s orchestra. George was an enormous man of thirty 5 who appeared somewhat like a redskin himself, with a blanket changed by night costume, and a bottle of fire-water by a martini glass. On the finish of every story he would set free a self-appreciative haw-haw-haw after which clap Leslie on the again with such enthusiasm that Leslie would crumple over the desk like a paper angel.
Dinner ended, George requested Mrs. Howard to bop and Leslie and I had been left alone on the desk relating to one another. I opened the dialog: “I hate my costume. Bernard Newman at Bergdorf-Goodman talked me into shopping for it – nevertheless it’s a lot too younger for me.” Leslie studied my lettuce inexperienced organza night costume with its full skirt, quick sleeves, and child collar. I turned in my chair to indicate him the bow in again. “What do you normally put on?” he requested. “Oh, one thing white and glittery with no again and lower all the way down to right here in entrance.” He thought of this for a second after which we each laughed and had one other glass of champagne. He had grow to be instantly, brilliantly alive. His well-known watchful eyes started to glitter mischievously as we in contrast our impressions of Hollywood. As a lot as I, he detested having to sit down many of the day within the studio ready for units and lights to be modified. After which he talked in regards to the theatre, how he dreaded having to check a brand new half, how sluggish he was at studying his traces. I laughed in disbelief. “You’re kidding me!” “No, it’s completely true,” he stated. “I wasn’t lower out to be an actor. I haven’t the vitality for appearing – it’s too exhausting.”
When Mrs. Howard and George returned from their dance and noticed our blissful intimacy, they determined to take us dwelling. Within the cab, Mrs. Howard and I sat on the again seat dealing with George and Leslie on the leap seats. My knees touched Leslie’s and we smiled at one another. However I knew once we stated goodnight that I might not see him once more. It will be too exhausting.
It was the popularity of this similar threatening exhaustion in Humphrey, I believe, that touched Leslie’s coronary heart, main him to power Jack Warner to present Humphrey the Duke Mantee half when The Petrified Forest was filmed. Moreover, whereas from the start of his profession Leslie had confessed his lack of vitality and let it work for him within the creation of the quiet, pure actor, he noticed that Humphrey fought his weak spot, attempting ineffectually to emulate the dynamic fashion of most profitable actors. All this he conveyed to Humphrey within the path of the play. And as soon as he grasped the concept he too would possibly obtain success with some model of pure appearing, Humphrey went about its contrivance with the crafty of a lover. For all actors know that actually pure appearing is rejected by the viewers. Though individuals are higher geared up to evaluate appearing than some other artwork, the hypocrisy of ‘sincerity’ prevents them from admitting that they too are all the time appearing some a part of their very own invention. To be a profitable actor, then, it’s essential so as to add some eccentricities and thriller to naturalness in order that the viewers can admire and puzzle over one thing completely different from itself.
Leslie’s eccentricities had been his ardour for his pipe and his somewhat queer garments. The thriller of his indestructible poise was the query of whether or not as an actor he wasn’t taking part in an enormous joke on everybody and getting paid for it. Bogart’s eccentricities had been the usage of his mouth and speech. The mysterious ingredient of his poise was the second of explosion. Leslie would have grow to be much less by revealing himself; by revealing himself, Bogart turned extra.
Bogart with Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
In doing analysis on Humphrey I used to be amazed to learn the variety of his ‘recreations’. He performed golf, tennis, bridge, chess. He sailed. He learn books! Besides on one event, the one factor I ever noticed him do was sit and drink and discuss with individuals. That one event was a night in New York when he and I, Blyth Daly and Alice Brady performed what Alice innocently known as bridge in her house on East Fifty-Seventh Avenue. To start with, she by no means stopped speaking. Then as quickly because the playing cards had been dealt she would rise up to combine drinks. After the bidding she would rise up to empty ashtrays. When she was dummy she would go to the piano to play and sing in her French mom’s tongue. At any time in any respect she would leap up with all her bracelets jingling to fly at one among her 4 yapping wire-haired fox terriers, who substituted her ivory satin window draperies for bushes and lamp-posts. We had been all relieved when her doorbell rang and Elsie Ferguson, together with her good-looking actor husband, got here in for a nightcap after the theatre. The bridge recreation was over. Sipping a brandy throughout the room from me, Elsie was as lovely in 1930 as she had been in movies in 1918. And it was with the outdated movie allure that she stated goodnight a couple of minutes later, leaving Alice sitting on her husband’s lap.
“How lengthy have Alice and Elsie’s husband identified one another?” I requested Humphrey as we left the house constructing. He checked out me blankly. It was Blyth who answered, “You fool, they only met!”
That clean look of Humphrey’s was the important thing to his perspective in the direction of intercourse. He was so contemptuous of different males’s must publicise their amorous triumphs that he refused to note them. Being himself supremely assured of his personal attractiveness to girls, he scorned each type of demonstrativeness. When a lady appealed to him, he waited for her just like the flame waits for the moth.
“Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horrors of struggle, and all of the agonies of the soul,” wrote Tolstoi, “however the tragedy that has all the time tormented him, and all the time will, is the tragedy of the bed room.” It was safety in intercourse that preserved Humphrey’s ego for achievement after he had endured, 3 times longer than any actor identified to historical past, the bitterest humiliation, ridicule and failure. Definitely, no different actor might have learn these two speeches in Throughout the Pacific together with his peculiar emphasis. When Greenstreet confirmed him his gun, Bogey produced his and stated, “My gun is larger than your gun.” And once more later when he pulled his gun on Greenstreet, he stated, “I instructed you-mine is larger than yours.”
Every of Humphrey’s wives was fittingly chosen to satisfy the trials of his profession. When he started to behave and had a lot to study in regards to the theatre, he married Helen Menken, the star of Seventh Heaven. Helen’s white skinny face was all the time ecstatically lifted as much as her imaginative and prescient of the Drama. I by no means heard her speak about something besides the artwork of the theatre. They had been divorced in 1927 after Helen had grow to be a sensation in The Captive, closed by the district legal professional on its a hundred and sixtieth efficiency due to its lesbian theme. Humphrey labored that 12 months the twelve pitiful performances of a comedy, Child Mine, wherein Roscoe Arbuckle tried to erase the scandal that had pushed him from Hollywood. Apart from a two-week revival of Saturday’s Kids in 1928, Humphrey didn’t work once more on Broadway till 1929 when, together with his new spouse, Mary Phillips, he appeared in Skyrocket, which closed after eleven performances. “The artwork of the theatre” having grow to be a sore topic, Mary was precisely proper for him through the time he required consolation greater than inspiration.
Apart from Leslie Howard, no different particular person contributed a lot to Humphrey’s success as his third spouse, Mayo Methot. He discovered her at a time of lethargy and loneliness when he may need gone on taking part in secondary gangster elements at Warner Brothers for a 12 months after which out. However he met Mayo and she or he set fireplace to him. These passions – envy, hatred and violence – which had been important to the Bogey character, which had been simmering beneath his failure for therefore a few years, she delivered to a boil, and blew the lid off all his inhibitions perpetually. A part of her mission was achieved beneath my direct statement.
Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942)
In October 1935, I left the Persian Room in New York, the place I had been dancing with Dario, to make a take a look at for the Republic Studio in Hollywood for a movie, Dancing Toes. On the day after the take a look at was accomplished and seen, the studio gave the half I had examined for to a blonde lady who couldn’t dance. Having little cash and no extra religion in myself, I stayed on in Hollywood for lack of a greater plan. I used to be residing on the Ronda flats, and in the future I strolled down the road to the Backyard of Allah, into the sitting room of Robert Benchley’s cottage, and there was Humphrey sitting on the ground, leaning in opposition to a settee, with a glass of Scotch and soda in his hand. He had little to say about his half in The Petrified Forest, which was in manufacturing at Warner Brothers. Two unsuccessful experiences in Hollywood didn’t permit him to really feel optimistic. Not feeling optimistic both was a boy from the M-G-M studio who had been despatched to choose up a script that Bob had not but begun to jot down.
The next night I acquired a cellphone name from Mary Huntoon, who was my outdated buddy and a niece of Dwight Deere Wiman the theatrical producer. She stated Humphrey and she or he had been having a drink at her home (she had simply grow to be his agent), and that Humphrey would really like me to hitch them. Coming from anybody else the invitation would have meant that two bored individuals wished firm. Coming from Humphrey it was nothing lower than a declaration of affection. Filled with curiosity, I hastened to the scene. It was not a cheerful one. Humphrey was so intuitive about girls that, after a glowing welcome, he retreated slowly into gloom and silence and Scotch, leaving the dialog to Mary and me. Using dwelling within the cab, I assumed in regards to the distinction between Humphrey and me. He might love solely a lady he had identified a very long time or, what amounted to the identical factor, one who was flung at him within the intimacy of a play or movie. To me, love was an journey into the unknown.
The Petrified Forest had been launched and Humphrey had made a stable hit in it after I subsequent noticed him. It was early within the 12 months of 1936 on the Beverly Hills dwelling of Eric Hatch, who had written My Man Godfrey. Once I went into the eating room, Eric and his spouse, Mischa Auer and his spouse, and Humphrey had been sitting on the desk. Mrs. Hatch obtained as much as pour me a cup of after-dinner espresso. As I drank it I watched Humphrey, whom I had by no means seen in such an emotional state. Everybody else was watching him too. Then the doorbell rang and, as if on cue, all of us obtained up and went downstairs into the vaulted lounge to satisfy Mayo Methot who was getting into from the corridor. No moth was she! She burned in a sheath of peacock blue silk.
That night time, as an alternative of our regular discuss and laughter, we turned an viewers galvanised by a scene of probably the most passionate love performed out between Mayo and Humphrey with out a lot as a contact of palms. Drinks had been combined and seats had been taken as Mayo moved restlessly to the gramophone and placed on an outdated Argentine tango, Adios Muchachos. Her dance with Mischa started as a burlesque, with him throwing her about and obvious lustfully into her eyes. Step by step, nevertheless, her exquisitely persuasive physique started to rule his actions and so they danced within the falling arcs, the sluggish recoveries, and the voluptuous pauses of the true tango.
The spell was damaged by a maid, who introduced that Mayo’s husband had telephoned to say that he was on his solution to the home. Humphrey sprang from the couch to whisk her away – however wait! She had taken off her slippers to bop, and now one among them couldn’t be discovered. All people looked for it besides me, which should have aroused Humphrey’s suspicions as a result of fairly instantly he lunged at me with probably the most hideous face, rasping, “God rattling you, Louise, inform us the place you hid Mayo’s slipper!” I used to be too surprised by this unusual and violent Humphrey to talk. Fortuitously, at this second Mischa stretched as much as an oak beam, which nobody else was tall sufficient to achieve, and introduced down the slipper. The lovers fled out by the again door because the entrance doorbell rang as soon as once more.
Bogart and Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
It was in New York in December of 1943 that I used to be to see Humphrey for the final time. I used to be eating on the restaurant ‘21’ with Townsend Martin. Between the dinner and the supper hour, the bar was empty when Mayo and Humphrey got here in and stood briefly at our desk to say howdy and inform us that they had been on their solution to Africa to entertain the troops. I used to be shocked to see how dreadfully Humphrey’s face had aged. The results of the struggle he had waged in opposition to his inertia – work and whisky with out sleep and meals – had been seen ultimately. Mayo appeared as if she had simply gotten off the bed together with her garments on. Her swimsuit was rumpled, her hair not combed, her face not made up. They sat at a desk in a far nook of the room as in the event that they wished to be alone, but they neither spoke nor checked out one another until their drinks had been delivered to the desk. Then Mayo turned to talk fiercely to Humphrey as if she had been persevering with some argument that might by no means be resolved. Slumped in opposition to the banquette, unmoved, he stared at his hand slowly turning his glass spherical and spherical on the desk.
It was plain that the crew of ‘The Battling Bogarts’ was quickly to interrupt up. He was Bogey now, his character firmly set, able to battling alone. With the discharge of Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart had grow to be huge enterprise. It was time for Lauren Bacall, who was primarily a enterprise lady, to make her entrance. She, who was additionally to grow to be his good display accomplice, as seductive as Eve, as cool because the serpent.
Bogart and Lauren Bacall of their first onscreen pairing, To Have and Have Not (1944)
My most vivid remembrance of the residing Humphrey Bogart is of an evening in New York at Tony’s restaurant on Fifty Second Avenue. I went in about one and sat at a desk close to Humphrey, who was sitting in a sales space with Thomas Mitchell. It was a couple of weeks earlier than The Petrified Forest would shut in June 1935, and Humphrey had nothing to sit up for besides summer time inventory in Skowhegan, Maine. Presently Mitchell paid his invoice and went out, leaving Humphrey alone consuming steadily with weary dedication. His head drooped decrease and decrease. Once I left he had fallen into his exhausted sleep together with his head sunk in his arms on the desk. “Poor Humphrey,” I stated to Tony, “he’s lastly licked.”
My most vivid remembrance of the display Humphrey Bogart is of a scene in his best movie, The Treasure of Sierra Madre. He lies within the grime, about to pull himself to the water gap. He has endured every little thing to get his gold-and now should he give it up? Vast open, the tragic eyes are raised to heaven in a horrible, beseeching look. “Despised and probably the most abject of males.” Within the agony of that lovely face I see the face of my St. Bogart.
