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Humphrey Bogart (December 25, 1899 –
January 14, 1957) was an iconic American actor who retains legendary
status decades after his death. In 1999, the American Film Institute
named Bogart the Greatest Male Star of All Time.
Bogart typically played smart, playful,
courageous, tough, occasionally reckless characters, living in a corrupt
world, yet anchored by an inner moral code. He was also able to play
characters with flaws and weaknesses that led to their destruction. His
most notable films include Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Maltese
Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big
Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948),
In a Lonely Place (1950), The African Queen (1951) (for which he won an
Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role), and The Caine Mutiny
(1954). In all, he appeared in 75 feature motion pictures.
Even outside of America, Bogart is seen as
a cult figure. French actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo were deeply
influenced by his work and image. In À bout de souffle (known in English
as Breathless), perhaps the best-known work of French director Jean-Luc
Godard, the protagonist Michel worships the persona of Humphrey Bogart
and mimes some of Bogart’s best-known gestures in a way that is both
absurd and touching. François Truffaut, another French director of the
“New Wave,” directed Shoot the Piano Player, another homage to Bogart.
India’s great national movie star Ashok Kumar listed Bogart as a major
influence on his “natural” acting style. When Bogart reached
Leopoldville to film the movie The African Queen, his plane was met by
the U.S. consul and the Congolese press.
Bogart is no less an icon in the country of
his birth. One of Woody Allen’s most popular comic movies, Play It
Again, Sam, is about a young man in love with Bogart’s aura and
intimidated by it. The title refers to a frequent misquote from
Casablanca; Richard Blaine (Bogart’s character) actually says “Play it,
Sam.” In 1997, the United States Postal Service featured Bogart in its
“Legends of Hollywood” series. And Entertainment Weekly magazine has
named Bogart the number one movie legend of all time.
Bogart’s exalted standing in the Hollywood
pantheon would have astonished most of the agents, casting directors and
studio bosses who knew him in the 1920s and 1930s as a good but hardly
great Broadway stage actor and B-movie player in Hollywood.
* * * *
Early life
He was born Humphrey
DeForest Bogart on 25 December 1899 in New York City, New York, the son
of Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey.
It was long believed that
his birthday on Christmas Day was a Warner Bros fiction created to
romanticise his background, and that he was really born on 23 January
1899, a date that appeared in many references. This story is now
considered baseless. Although no birth certificate has ever been found
to settle the issue conclusively, his birth notice did appear in a
Boston newspaper in early January 1900, which would support the December
1899 date. Lauren Bacall always maintained this was his true birth date.
Bogart's father was a
successful surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was a very successful
commercial illustrator. Indeed, she used a drawing of her baby Humphrey
Bogart in a well-known ad campaign for Mellins Baby Food. In her prime,
she made over $50,000 a year as an illustrator, then a vast sum for a
woman to earn (or a man for that matter). The Bogarts lived in a
fashionable Upper West Side apartment, and had a cottage in upstate New
York.
Maud Humphrey was a distant
woman and the Bogarts' marriage was troubled. Both parents were
alcoholics and/or morphine addicts at various times. Maud also suffered
intense migraine headaches. "I can't say I ever loved my mother," Bogart
once said. "I admired her." He was raised mostly by an Irish nurse. "My
parents fought," he said another time. "We kids would pull the covers
over our ears to keep out the sound of fighting. Our home was kept
together for the sake of the children as well as for the sake of
propriety."
From his father, Bogart
inherited a tendency for needling people, and a love of fishing and
especially sailing. Humphrey was the oldest child of three. Both of
Bogart's younger sisters were troubled adults; Kay ("Catty") died at 34
of peritonitis complicated by alcoholism. Frances "Pat" Bogart Rose was
tall, shy and sweet, but mentally unstable. Bogart was gentle with her
and paid for her care. Other relatives were few and rarely saw the
Bogarts. (When Bogart fell in love with Lauren Bacall and she introduced
him to her large extended family, he said "Christ, you've got more
goddamn relatives than I've ever seen.")
As a boy, Bogart was teased
for his curls, his tidiness, his lisp, for the "cute" pictures his
mother posed him for, the Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes she dressed him
in—and for the name "Humphrey." In a childhood accident, Bogart got a
splinter of wood embedded in his lower lip. "Goddamn doctor," Bogart
later told David Niven, "instead of stitching it up, he screwed it up."
The accident left Bogart with a slight lisp.
The Bogarts sent their son
to the Trinity School in New York and then to the prestigious prep
school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. They hoped he would
go on to Yale, but in 1918, Bogart was expelled from Phillips Academy.
The details of his expulsion are disputed. One story says that he was
expelled for throwing a janitor into the local pond, while others say
that he was expelled for smoking and drinking. His study habits were
erratic and his grades low, and he may have hastened his departure by
some intemperate comments to those in authority. He had a lifelong
dislike of authority figures.
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Early career
Bogart did menial labor,
joined the Naval Reserve, and eventually drifted into acting. He liked
the late hours that actors kept, and enjoyed the attention that an actor
got on stage. Most of all, he enjoyed the challenge of putting on a
difficult scene, making the audience believe it. He dug deeply into the
characters he portrayed, and found them a welcome escape from his own
self.
He began his acting career
on the Brooklyn stage in 1921, playing a Japanese butler. He never took
acting lessons, and had no formal training. An early reviewer wrote of
Bogart's work: "To be as kind as possible, we will only say that this
actor was inadequate." Bogart loathed the trivial roles he had to play
early in his career, calling them "White Pants Willie" roles.
Bogart was in 21 Broadway
productions between 1922 and 1935. He played callow juveniles, or the
romantic second lead in drawing room comedies. The legend persists that
he was the first actor to say "Tennis, anyone?" on stage.
Early in his career, Bogart
met his first wife, Helen Menken. They married in 1926, divorced in
1927, and remained friends. In 1928, he married his second wife, Mary
Philips. Philips, like Menken, had a fiery temper, once biting the
finger of a cop who tried to arrest her for drunkenness.
Spencer Tracy was a serious
Broadway actor whom Bogart liked and admired, and they became good
friends. It was Spencer Tracy, in 1930, who first called Bogart "Bogie."
The name stuck.
In 1934, Bogart starred in
the play Invitation to a Murder. The producer Arthur Hopkins saw the
play and sent for Bogart when he chose to produce Robert Sherwood's new
play, The Petrified Forest. Bogart arrived in Hopkins' office while
Sherwood was there; Hopkins told him: "I've got a good role for you. A
gangster role." Robert Sherwood was sure Hopkins was wrong; Bogart
should play the football player. Bogart said later: "They argued back
and forth, and I thought Sherwood was right. I couldn't picture myself
playing a gangster. So what happened? I made a hit as the gangster."
The Petrified Forest had
197 performances in New York; Bogart played escaped killer Duke Mantee.
Leslie Howard, who played the lead, knew how crucial Bogart was to the
success of the play. He and Bogart became friends, and he promised to
help Bogart reprise his role if Hollywood made the play into a movie.
Bogart was proud of his
success as an actor, but the fact that it came from playing a gangster
weighed on him. He once said, "I can't get in a mild discussion without
turning it into an argument. There must be something in my tone of
voice, or this arrogant face—something that antagonizes everybody.
Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that's why I'm cast as the heavy."
Warner Brothers bought the
screen rights to The Petrified Forest, signed up Leslie Howard, then
tested several Hollywood veterans for the Duke Mantee role, and chose
Edward G. Robinson. Bogart cabled news of this to Howard, who was in
Scotland. Leslie Howard insisted that Bogart play Duke Mantee. When
Warner Brothers saw that Leslie Howard would not budge, they hired
Bogart to play Mantee. Bogart never forgot this, and named his only
daughter Leslie.
Robert Sherwood remained a
close friend of Bogart's. In 1936, the movie version of The Petrified
Forest came out. Bogart got excellent reviews. Still, he was stuck in a
series of crime dramas for Warner Brothers and cast as a heavy, with
little acting range. All told, in his career as a tough guy, Bogart went
to the electric chair 12 times, and got over 800 years of hard labor.
Jack Warner saw nothing wrong with that; as long as the movies made
money, and the actors got paid, he saw no reason for anyone to complain.
Mary Philips refused to
give up her Broadway career to come to Hollywood with Bogart, and soon
they were divorced.
On August 21, 1938, Bogart
made a disastrous third marriage, which only heightened his frustration.
His third wife was Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober, but
a paranoid drunk. She was convinced that her husband was cheating on
her. The more she and Bogart drifted apart, the more she drank and the
more she got furious and threw things at him: plants, crockery, anything
close at hand. Bogart sometimes returned fire, and the press dubbed them
"the Battling Bogarts." "The Bogart-Methot marriage was the sequel to
the Civil War," said their friend Julius Epstein. Another wag observed
that there was madness in his Methot. During his marriage to Mayo Methot,
Bogart bought a sailboat, which he lightheartedly named Sluggy after his
hot-tempered wife.
In 1938, Warner Brothers
made Bogart do a "hillbilly musical" called Swing Your Lady, playing a
wrestling promoter managing the career of an idiotic giant. In 1939,
Bogart reached a new low when he had to play a vampire in The Return of
Doctor X. Bogart cracked: "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood…I wouldn't
have minded so much. The trouble was they were drinking mine and I was
making this stinking movie."
The studio system, then in
its heyday, largely restricted actors to one studio, and Warner Brothers
had no interest in making Bogart a star. The system was made for
quantity, not quality. Shooting on a new movie might begin days or only
hours after shooting on the last movie was complete. Any actor who
refused a role could be suspended without pay. Bogart didn't like the
roles chosen for him, but he worked steadily: between 1936 and 1940,
Bogart averaged a new movie every two months. He thought that Warner
Brothers were cheap in their wardrobe department, and often wore his own
personal suits in his movies. On the movie High Sierra, Bogart used his
own mutt to play his character's dog "Pard."
In California, in the
1930s, Bogart bought a 55-foot sailing yacht from Dick Powell and June
Allyson. The sea was his sanctuary. He was a serious sailor, respected
by other sailors who had seen too many Hollywood actors and their boats.
About 30 weekends a year, he went out on his boat. He once said: "An
actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to nail
down what he really is, not what he is currently pretending to be."
The leading men ahead of
Bogart included not just such classic stars as James Cagney, Spencer
Tracy and Edward G. Robinson—but also actors far less well-known today,
such as Victor McLaglen, George Raft and Paul Muni. Most of the better
movie scripts Warner Brothers bought went to these men. Bogart had to
take what was left. He made movies with names like Racket Busters, San
Quentin, and You Can't Get Away With Murder. Bogart rarely saw his own
movies and didn't even attend the premieres, which were an expected part
of the actor's job.
Bogart had been raised to
believe that acting was something beneath a gentleman. Acting in movies
was even worse than on the stage, and playing depraved gunmen in "B"
pictures for Warner Brothers was not something to be mentioned in polite
company.
He had a lifelong disgust
for the pretentious, fake or phony. Sensitive yet caustic, and disgusted
by the inferior movies he was churning out, Bogart cultivated the
persona of a soured idealist, a man exiled from better things in New
York, living by his wits, drinking too much, cursed to live out his life
among second-rate people and projects. When he thought an actor,
director or a movie studio had done something shoddy, he spoke up about
it, and was willing to be quoted on the record. The Hollywood press,
unaccustomed to candor, was delighted. Bogart once said, "All over
Hollywood, they are continually advising me 'Oh, you mustn't say that.
That will get you in a lot of trouble' when I remark that some picture
or writer or director or producer is no good. I don't get it. If he
isn't any good, why can't you say so? If more people would mention it,
pretty soon it might start having some effect."
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Rise to stardom
High Sierra, a 1941 Raoul
Walsh movie, was written by Bogart's friend and drinking partner, John
Huston. The movie was a step forward for Bogart. He still played the
villain, "Mad Dog" Roy Earle. He still died at the end; but at least he
got to kiss Ida Lupino, and to play a character with some depth. In a
climactic scene, Bogart's character slid 90 feet down a mountainside to
his punishment. His stunt double, Buster Wiles, bounced a few times
going down the mountain and wanted another take to do better. "Forget
it," said Raoul Walsh. "It's good enough for the 25-cent customers."
Bogart and Huston enjoyed
each other, and drew on each other's gifts. Bogart had always been
self-conscious about being a small man; Huston was about 6'5". Bogart
had never been close to his father; Huston was very close to his father,
the actor Walter Huston.
Bogart admired and somewhat
envied Huston because Huston got to write scripts, to shape a story and
make sure it had heft. Though a poor student, Bogart was a lifelong
reader. He could quote Plato, Pope, Ralph Waldo Emerson and over a
thousand lines of Shakespeare. He admired writers, and some of his best
friends were screenwriters, including Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel
Benchley and Nunnally Johnson.
John Huston reported being
easily bored, and admired Bogart not just for his acting talent but for
his intense concentration.
James Cagney and George
Raft had both turned down Bogart's part in High Sierra; Raft didn't want
to play a character who died at the end. Now George Raft turned down the
male lead in John Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, also
1941.
Bogart grabbed the part and
audiences saw him play a leading role with real complexity. His
character Sam Spade was still capable of duplicity and violence, but he
was a leading man: handsome, smart, fated to survive. When he discovered
his sexy client was a murderess, he turned her in, with a speech he made
famous: "I don't care who loves you. I won't play the sap for you! You
killed Miles and you're going over for it. I hope they don't hang you by
your sweet neck. If you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years and
you'll come back to me. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."
As America entered World
War II, it turned to a new kind of leading man, less dapper and
polished, but tougher and more willing to use violence to make the world
safe and to get what he wanted. Bogart's persona was much better suited
to the war years than to the 1930s. Bogart played a guy who'd grown up
on the streets, a guy who knew how to fire a gun, how to punch a guy on
the jaw, and spit out "Tell that to your boss."
Bogart got his first real
romantic lead in Casablanca, playing Rick Blaine, the nightclub owner.
Bogart had learned how to convey pain in his eyes and to show emotion
with subtle shadings of his voice. He was still young but looked like a
man who had lived hard.
As Casablanca became an
iconic movie, much was made of the fact that its script was still being
written as shooting on the movie began. Less well understood is that the
character of Rick Blaine drew powerfully on the persona that Bogart had
been cultivating in real life for at least six years. The soured
idealist; the loner; the hard-drinking man exiled from better things in
New York—all of these were crucial parts of Rick Blaine—and of Bogart.
Bogart played a complex man wary of showing his emotions or ideals, a
chess player who kept even his friends off balance. In real life, Bogart
himself played tournament chess, achieving expert strength, one level
below master level. Bogart reportedly asked that Blaine also be
portrayed as a chess player.
Bogart was surrounded by a
fine international cast, including Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains, Peter
Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Paul Henreid and Conrad Veidt. Dooley Wilson
played the part of Sam, Rick's confidant and piano player, even though
he could not play the piano. The script and Max Steiner's musical score
have both been praised extensively, as has the cinematography.
The stories that Ronald
Reagan had been offered, but passed on, the role of Rick are just that,
stories, resulting from the casual lies pumped out by studio publicity
departments in those days to keep fans interested in the activities of a
star who was not doing anything newsworthy at the time. Warner Brothers'
publicity department concocted similar tales during the shooting of
Casablanca, e.g., that Bogart was learning Swedish so that he could woo
Bergman, that were just as spurious.
Off the set, Bergman and
Bogart hardly spoke during the filming of Casablanca. She said later, "I
kissed him but I never knew him." Years later, after Ingrid Bergman had
taken up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and borne him a
child, Bogart bawled her out for it. "You used to be a great star," he
said. "What are you now?" "A happy woman," she replied.
Casablanca won the 1943
Academy Award for Best Picture. Bogart was nominated for the Best Actor
in a Leading Role, but lost out to Paul Lukas for his performance in
Watch on the Rhine.
Bogart and Bacall
Only Bogart's fourth
marriage, to Lauren Bacall, was a happy one. They met while making To
Have and Have Not. Bogart played a tough, independent fisherman named
Steve, who got pushed to his limit by some unsavory people and then got
his revenge. They were married on 21 May 1945 at Malabar Farm, the home
of Louis Bromfield.
Bacall became an overnight
sensation with her famous line to Bogart. Leaning against a doorway, her
head down and voice low, she told Bogart's character: "You know how to
whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together, and blow."
Bogart fell in love with
Bacall. The movie's director, Howard Hawks, once commented: "When two
people are falling in love with each other, they're not tough to get
along with, I can tell you that. Bogie was marvelous. I said "You've got
to help" and of course after a few days he really began to get
interested in the girl. That made him help more." Hawks also said of
Bacall: "She had to keep practicing for six to eight months to keep that
low voice. Now, it's perfectly natural. And the funny thing is that
Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep
playing it the rest of her life."
Bogart had another strong,
unspoken friendship with Walter Brennan, who played a harmless drunk
named Eddie in To Have and Have Not. Hawks recalled: "The fellow who
rented their boat said 'What do you take care of him for?' Bogart looked
at him and said, 'He thinks he's taking care of me.' And he wasn't very
nice the way he said it. Those are the relationships that happen between
men."
Bogart and Bacall's
relationship is at the heart of the film noir masterpiece The Big Sleep.
The plot is complex and has holes in it that even Raymond Chandler, who
wrote the novel on which it was based, could not explain. Hawks himself
admitted "I never figured out what was going on but I thought [it] had
great scenes in it…After that got by, I said, 'I'm never going to worry
about being logical again.'"
Chandler thoroughly admired
Bogart's performance: "Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also he has a
sense of humor that contains that grating undertone of contempt."
Bacall allowed Bogart lots
of weekend time on his boat. She got seasick on boats and Bogart liked
the boat to be an all-male preserve, stating "The trouble with having
dames on board is you can't pee over the side." Bogart would frequently
sail to Catalina with friends or set some lobster traps.
Bogart allowed Bacall
romantic crushes on Adlai Stevenson and Leonard Bernstein, knowing she'd
married young before ever having much chance to date. But he made clear
he'd leave Bacall if she ever had an affair. She never did. Bacall once
wrote of Bogart: "You had to stay awake married to him. Every time I
thought I could relax and do everything I wanted, he'd buck. There was
no way to predict his reactions, no matter how well I knew him."
Bogart and Bacall moved
into a $160,000 white brick mansion in Holmby Hills, an exclusive
neighborhood between Beverly Hills and Bel Air. Bogart and Bacall had
two Jaguar cars, and three blooded Boxer dogs. Bogart said "We moved
where all the creeps live." But he enjoyed some of his neighbors,
especially Judy Garland.
When Lauren Bacall learned
she was pregnant, she was ecstatic. Bogart came home from a day at the
studio, and she met him with the great news. He grew very quiet. He put
his arm around her and led her gently into the house. He was quiet
during dinner—and then, after dinner, Bogart and Bacall had the worst
fight they ever had. Bogart had finally found a woman he truly loved,
and he didn't want to share her. He was scared of losing her affection
to a baby.
When Lauren Bacall gave
birth to a son, Stephen, Bogart became a father at 49. He'd had months
to absorb the news, had even had his own baby shower. (Frank Sinatra had
brought him baby rattles.) But Bogart still felt awkward about being a
father. ("What do you do with a kid?" he asked a friend. "They don't
drink.") In 1952, they had their second child, Leslie (a girl, named
after actor Leslie Howard).
In 1950, Bogart and his
friend Bill Seeman arrived at the El Morocco Club in New York after
midnight. Bogart had bought two giant stuffed panda bears for Stephen
and he and Seeman introduced the bears around as their "dates" and
demanded a table for four. They propped up the bears in separate chairs,
and began doing some heavy drinking.
Two young women at the club
saw the pandas. One of them picked up one of the pandas. Bogart got
angry and pushed her. After she fell to the floor, her friend picked up
the other panda, Bogart said something cruel, and her boyfriend arrived
and began throwing plates. After a wild scuffle, Bogart, Seeman and the
pandas were thrown out of El Morocco and told never to return.
One of the women sued
Bogart for $25,000. He showed up in court and was asked: "Were you
drunk?" "Isn't everybody at three in the morning?" he replied. The case
was dropped. Later, he mused: "Errol Flynn and I are the only ones left
who do any good old hell-raising."
Bogart also loved to go to
Romanoff's in Beverly Hills. A valet would take the Jaguar, and a maitre
d' would lead Bogart to his regular booth. Friends would stop by to chat
or talk shop: David Niven, Judy Garland, Richard Brooks, Swifty Lazar,
Spencer Tracy. Rock Hudson was a rising star; when he saw him, Bogart
would ask, "What the hell kind of name is 'Rock' Hudson?"
Bogart considered Mike
Romanoff a poseur but nonetheless counted him a close friend. Among
other things, Bogart admired him as a chess player and appreciated his
tendency to needle people. Mike Romanoff was a man with a cultivated
Oxford accent, who insisted that his true name was "Prince Michael
Alexandrovitch Dmitri Obolensky Romanoff", and that he was a blood
nephew of the former Russian tsar.
Mike Romanoff would greet
Bogart by saying, "Good afternoon, Mr. Bogart. Are you going to be
paying your bill today? I thought that might be a pleasant change."
Bogart would smile and
reply: "Are you going to be putting any alcohol in your drinks today?
That might be a pleasant change."
If Lauren Bacall was with
Bogart, Romanoff might turn to her and say: "I see that you are still
dating the same aging actor."
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Later career
In 1951, Bogart starred in
the movie The African Queen, with Katharine Hepburn, and again directed
by his friend John Huston. It was a difficult shoot, on location in
Africa. One day the boat The African Queen sank. (Lauren Bacall
recalled: "The natives had been told to watch it and they did—they
watched it sink.")
John Huston recalled:
"Bogie didn't particularly care for the Charlie Alnutt role when he
started, but I slowly got him into it, showing him by expression and
gesture what I thought Alnutt should be like. He first imitated me, then
all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd,
brave little man. He realized he was on to something new and good. He
said to me, 'John, don't let me lose it.'"
Hepburn's proper spinster
character scolded Bogart's Charlie Alnutt: "Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what
we are put in this world to rise above." Bogart had a famous put down
too: "You crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid!"
The role of Charlie Alnutt
won Bogart his first Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in
1952. He had vowed to friends that if he won, his speech would break the
convention of thanking everyone in sight. He would say instead: "I don't
owe anything to anyone! I earned this award by hard work and paying
attention to my craft." But when Bogart won the Academy Award, he
thanked John Huston, Katharine Hepburn, the cast and crew of the movie.
He had always felt Hollywood people did not like him much, and he was
deeply moved to find himself so popular now.
Bogart relied on his
standing with his fellow actors to organize a delegation who went to
Washington, D.C., during the height of McCarthyism, to protest the House
Unamerican Activities Committee's harassment of Hollywood writers and
actors. Bogart was not, however, prepared to deal with the industry
pressure to abandon this campaign; within a year he disavowed his
activities, retreating to his role as actor and apologizing for speaking
out on politics.
The Caine Mutiny was
Bogart's last major movie. He dropped his asking price to get the role
of Captain Queeg, then griped with some of his old bitterness about it.
("This never happens to Cooper or Grant or Gable, but always to me. Why
does it happen to me?")
Bogart gave a bravura
performance as Captain Queeg. Queeg was in many ways an extension of the
character he had played in The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The Big
Sleep—the wary loner who trusts no one—but with none of the warmth or
humor that made those characters so appealing. Like his portrayal of
Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bogart played—but did
not overplay—a paranoid, self-pitying character whose small-mindedness
eventually destroyed him.
Bogart had always treated
his body poorly, and often drank heavily when not working. (Typically
contrary, the one night he refused to get drunk was New Year's Eve.) He
smoked unfiltered Chesterfields. Once, after signing a long-term deal
with Warner Brothers, Bogart predicted with glee that his teeth and hair
would fall out before the contract ended. That sent a fuming Jack Warner
to his lawyers.
In 1955, he made three
movies: The Desperate Hours, The Left Hand of God, and We're No Angels.
Each movie had a special satisfaction. The Desperate Hours gave him a
third chance to play a hostage drama. During The Left Hand of God,
Bogart was able to befriend Gene Tierney, and encourage her to get the
psychiatric help he thought she badly needed. In We're No Angels, he got
a starring role for Joan Bennett, who'd been out of work for three years
after a family scandal.
But his health was
failing—Bogart had cancer of the esophagus. He almost never spoke of it
and refused to see a doctor until January of 1956, and by then removal
of his esophagus, two lymph nodes and a rib was too little, too late.
Katharine Hepburn and
Spencer Tracy came to see him. Bogart was too weak to walk up and down
stairs. He tried to joke about it: "Put me in the dumbwaiter and I'll
ride down to the first floor in style. Come on—I'm a little guy—I'll
fit."
Hepburn has described the
last time she and Spencer Tracy saw Bogart: "Spence patted him on the
shoulder and said, 'Goodnight, Bogie.' Bogie turned his eyes to Spence
very quietly and with a sweet smile covered Spence's hand with his own
and said, 'Goodbye, Spence.' Spence's heart stood still. He understood."
Bogart had just turned 57
and weighed only 80 pounds (36 kg) when he died on January 14, 1957. His
funeral was held at All Saints Episcopal Church with musical selections
played from Bogart's favorite composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and
Claude Debussy. Lauren Bacall had asked Spencer Tracy to give the eulogy
but Tracy was too upset. John Huston gave the eulogy instead, and
reminded the gathered mourners that while Bogart's life had ended far
too soon, it had been a rich one. Huston said: "He is quite
irreplaceable. There will never be another like him."
Huston also noted of
Bogart: "Himself, he never took too seriously—his work most seriously.
He regarded the somewhat gaudy figure of Bogart, the star, with an
amused cynicism; Bogart, the actor, he held in deep respect…In each of
the fountains at Versailles there is a pike which keeps all the carp
active; otherwise they would grow overfat and die. Bogie took rare
delight in performing a similar duty in the fountains of Hollywood. Yet
his victims seldom bore him any malice, and when they did, not for long.
His shafts were fashioned only to stick into the outer layer of
complacency, and not to penetrate through to the regions of the spirit
where real injuries are done."
Katharine Hepburn: "He was
one of the biggest guys I ever met. He walked straight down the center
of the road. No maybes. Yes or no. He liked to drink. He drank. He liked
to sail a boat. He sailed a boat. He was an actor. He was happy and
proud to be an actor. He'd say to me, 'Are you comfortable? Everything
okay?' He was looking out for me."
Bogart once said of
himself: "I don't approve of the John Waynes and the Gary Coopers saying
'Shucks, I ain't no actor—I'm just a bridge builder or a gas station
attendant.' If they aren't actors, what the hell are they getting paid
for? I have respect for my profession. I worked hard at it."
His cremated remains are
interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendale, California.
Buried with him is a small gold whistle, which he had given to his
future wife, Lauren Bacall, before they married. In reference to their
first movie together, it was inscribed: "If you want anything, just
whistle."
Humphrey Bogart's hand and
foot prints are immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese
Theater and he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6322
Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood.
His last words were, "I
never should have switched from scotch to martinis."
* * * *
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