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Humphrey DeForest Bogart (December 25, 1899 – January 14, 1957) was an American actor. He is widely regarded as a cultural icon. The American Film Institute ranked Bogart as the greatest male star in the history of American cinema. After trying various jobs, Bogart began acting in 1921 and became a regular in Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 reduced the demand for plays, Bogart turned to film. His first great success was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), and this led to a period of typecasting as a gangster with films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and B-movies like The Return of Doctor X (1939). His breakthrough as a leading man came in 1941, with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year, his performance in Casablanca raised
him to the peak of his profession and, at the same time, cemented his
trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately
shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; Sabrina (1954) and The Caine Mutiny (1954). His last movie was The Harder They Fall (1956). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films. Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 25 December 1899 in New York City, the first child of Belmont DeForest Bogart (July 1867, Watkins Glen, New York – September 8, 1934, Tudor City apartments, New York, New York) and Maud Humphrey (1868 – 1940). Belmont and Maud were married in June 1898. Bogart is a Dutch name meaning “orchard”. Bogart's father was a Presbyterian, while his mother was an Episcopalian. Bogart was raised in his mother's faith. Bogart's birthday has been a subject of controversy. It was long believed that his birthday on Christmas Day 1899, was a Warner Bros.fiction
created to romanticize his background, and that he was really born on
January 23, 1899, a date that appears in many references. However, this
story is now considered baseless: although no birth certificate has
ever been found, his birth notice did appear in a New York newspaper in
early January 1900, which supports the December 1899 date, as do other
sources, such as the 1900 census. Bogart's
father, Belmont, was a surgeon specializing in heart and lungs. His
mother, Maud Humphrey, was a commercial illustrator, who received her
art training in New York and France, including study with James McNeill Whistler, and who later became artistic director of the fashion magazine The Delineator. She was a militant suffragette. She used a drawing of baby Humphrey in a well known ad campaign for Mellins Baby Food. In her prime, she made over $50,000 a year, then a vast sum, far more than her husband's $20,000 per year. The Bogarts lived in a fashionable Upper West Side apartment, and had an elegant cottage on a fifty-five acre estate in upstate New York on Canandaigua Lake. As a youngster, Humphrey's gang of friends at the lake would put on theatricals. Humphrey was the oldest of three children; he had two younger sisters, Frances and Catherine Elizabeth (Kay). His
parents were very formal, busy in their careers, and frequently
fought — resulting in little emotion directed at the children, "I was
brought up very unsentimentally but very straightforwardly. A kiss, in
our family, was an event. Our mother and father didn’t glug over my two
sisters and me." As a boy, Bogart was teased for his curls, his tidiness, the "cute" pictures his mother had him pose for, the Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes she dressed him in — and the name "Humphrey." From
his father, Bogart inherited a tendency for needling people, a fondness
for fishing, a life-long love of boating, and an attraction to
strong willed women. The
Bogarts sent their son to private schools. Humphrey began school at the
Delancey School until fifth grade, when he was enrolled in Trinity School. He was an indifferent, sullen student who showed no interest in after-school activities. Later he went to the prestigious preparatory school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was admitted based on family connections. They hoped he would go on to Yale, but in 1918, Bogart was expelled. The
details of his expulsion are disputed: one story claims that he was
expelled for throwing the headmaster (alternatively, a groundskeeper)
into Rabbit Pond, a man made lake on campus. Another cites smoking and
drinking, combined with poor academic performance and possibly some
intemperate comments to the staff. It has also been said that he was
actually withdrawn from the school by his father for failing to improve
his academics, as opposed to expulsion. In any case, his parents were
deeply dismayed by the events and their failed plans for his future. Coming up with no other career options, Bogart followed his love for the sea and enlisted in the United States Navy in the spring of 1918. He recalled later, “At eighteen, war was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn!” Bogart is recorded as a model sailor who spent most of his months in the Navy after the Armistice was signed, ferrying troops back from Europe. It
was during his naval stint that Bogart may have gotten his trademark
scar and developed his characteristic lisp, though the actual
circumstances are unclear. In one account, during a shelling of his
ship the USS Leviathan, his lip was cut by a piece of shrapnel, although some claim Bogart did not make it to sea until after the Armistice was signed. Another version, which Bogart's long time friend, author Nathaniel Benchley, claims is the truth, is that Bogart was injured while on assignment to take a naval prisoner to Portsmouth Naval Prison in Kittery, Maine.
Supposedly, while changing trains in Boston, the handcuffed prisoner
asked Bogart for a cigarette and while Bogart looked for a match, the
prisoner raised his hands, smashed Bogart across the mouth with his
cuffs, cutting Bogart's lip, and fled. The prisoner was eventually
taken to Portsmouth. An alternate explanation is in the process of
uncuffing an inmate, Bogart was struck in the mouth when the inmate
wielded one open, uncuffed bracelet while the other side was still on
his wrist. According to Darwin Porter's Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years, the scar was caused by his father, Belmont, during a terrible argument. By the time Bogart was treated by a doctor, the scar had already formed. "Goddamn doctor," Bogart later told David Niven,
"instead of stitching it up, he screwed it up." Niven says that when he
asked Bogart about his scar he said it was caused by a childhood
accident; Niven claims the stories that Bogart got the scar during
wartime were made up by the studios to inject glamour. His post service
physical makes no mention of the lip scar even though it mentions many
smaller scars, so the actual cause may have come later. When actress Louise Brooks met
Bogart in 1924, he had some scarred tissue on his upper lip, which
Belmont Bogart may have partially repaired before Bogart went into
films in 1930. She
believes his scar had nothing to do with his distinctive speech
pattern, his "lip wound gave him no speech impediment, either before or
after it was mended. Over the years, Bogart practiced all kinds of lip
gymnastics, accompanied by nasal tones, snarls, lisps and slurs. His
painful wince, his leer, his fiendish grin were the most accomplished ever seen on film." Bogart returned home to find Belmont was suffering from poor health (perhaps aggravated by morphine addiction), his medical practice was faltering, and he lost much of the family's money on bad investments in timber. During
his naval days, Bogart's character and values developed independent of
family influence, and he began to rebel somewhat from their values. He
came to be a liberal who hated pretensions, phonies, and snobs, and at
times he defied conventional behavior and authority, traits he
displayed in life and in his movies. On the other hand, he retained
their traits of good manners, articulateness, punctuality, modesty, and
a dislike of being touched. After his naval service, Bogart worked as a shipper and then bond salesman. He joined the Naval Reserve. More
importantly, he resumed his friendship with boyhood mate Bill Brady,
Jr. whose father had show business connections, and eventually Bogart
got an office job working for William A. Brady Sr.'s new company World Films. Bogart got to try his hand at screenwriting, directing, and production, but excelled at none. For a while, he was stage manager for Brady's daughter's play A Ruined Lady. A few months later, in 1921, Bogart made his stage debut in Drifting as a Japanese butler in another Alice Brady play, nervously speaking one line of dialog. Several more appearances followed in her subsequent plays. Bogart
liked the late hours actors kept, and enjoyed the attention an actor
got on stage. He stated, “I was born to be indolent and this was the
softest of rackets”. He spent a lot of his free time in speakeasies and
became a heavy drinker. A barroom brawl during this time might have
been the actual cause of Bogart's lip damage, as this coincides better
with the Louise Brooks account. Bogart
had been raised to believe acting was beneath a gentleman, but he
enjoyed stage acting. He never took acting lessons, but was persistent
and worked steadily at his craft. He appeared in at least seventeen
Broadway productions between 1922 and 1935. He
played juveniles or romantic second leads in drawing room comedies. He
is said to have been the first actor to ask "Tennis, anyone?" on stage. Critic Alexander Woollcott wrote of Bogart's early work that he "is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate." Some reviews were kinder. Heywood Broun, reviewing Nerves wrote, “Humphrey Bogart gives the most effective performance ... both dry and fresh, if that be possible”. Bogart loathed the trivial, effeminate parts he had to play early in his career, calling them "White Pants Willie" roles. Early in his career, while playing double roles in the play Drifting at the Playhouse Theatre in 1922, Bogart met actress Helen Menken. They were married on May 20, 1926 at the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York City, divorced on November 18, 1927, but remained friends. On April 3, 1928, he married Mary Philips at her mother's apartment in Hartford, Connecticut.
She, like Menken, had a fiery temper and, like every other Bogart
spouse, was an actress. He had met Mary when they appeared in the play Nerves, which had a very brief run at the Comedy Theatre in September 1924. After the stock market crash of 1929, stage production dropped off sharply, and many of the more photogenic actors headed for Hollywood. Bogart's earliest film role is with Helen Hayes in the 1928 two-reeler The Dancing Town, of which a complete copy has never been found. He also appeared with Joan Blondell and Ruth Etting in a Vitaphone short, Broadway's Like That (1930) which was re-discovered in 1963. Bogart then signed a contract with Fox Film Corporation for $750 a week. Spencer Tracy was
a serious Broadway actor whom Bogart liked and admired, and they became
good friends and drinking buddies. It was Tracy, in 1930, who first
called him "Bogey". (Spelled variously in many sources, Bogart himself
spelled his nickname "Bogie".) Tracy and Bogart appeared in their only film together in John Ford's early sound film Up the River (1930), with both playing inmates. It was Tracy's film debut. Bogart then performed in The Bad Sister with Bette Davis in 1931, in a minor part. Bogart
shuttled back and forth between Hollywood and the New York stage from
1930 to 1935, suffering long periods without work. His parents had
separated, and Belmont died in 1934 in debt, which Bogart eventually
paid off. (Bogart inherited his father's gold ring which he always
wore, even in many of his films. At his father's deathbed, Bogart
finally told Belmont how much he loved him.) Bogart's
second marriage was on the rocks, and he was less than happy with his
acting career to date; he became depressed, irritable, and drank
heavily. Bogart starred in the Broadway play Invitation to a Murder at the Theatre Masque, now the John Golden Theatre, in 1934. The producer Arthur Hopkins heard the play from off-stage and sent for Bogart to play escaped murderer Duke Mantee in Robert E. Sherwood's new play, The Petrified Forest. Hopkins recalled: When
I saw the actor I was somewhat taken aback, for he was the one I never
much admired. He was an antiquated juvenile who spent most of his stage
life in white pants swinging a tennis racquet. He seemed as far from a
cold blooded killer as one could get, but the voice (dry and tired)
persisted, and the voice was Mantee's. The play had 197 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York in 1935. Leslie Howard though, was the star. A critic for the New York Times Brooks Atkinson said of the play, “a peach ... a roaring Western melodrama ... Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as an actor.” Bogart
said the movie “marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek,
sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed ‘smoothies’ to which I seemed
condemned to life.” However, he was still feeling insecure. Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to The Petrified Forest.
The studio was famous for its socially realistic, urban, low budget
action pictures; the play seemed like the perfect property for it,
especially since the public was entranced by real life criminals like John Dillinger and Dutch Schultz. Bette Davis and
Leslie Howard were cast. Howard, who held production rights, made it
clear he wanted Bogart to star with him. The studio tested several
Hollywood veterans for the Duke Mantee role, and chose Edward G. Robinson, who had greater star appeal and was due to make a film to fulfill his
expensive contract. Bogart cabled news of this to Howard, who was in Scotland.
Howard cabled reply was, “Att: Jack Warner Insist Bogart Play Mantee No
Bogart No Deal L.H.”. When Warner Bros. saw that Howard would not
budge, they gave in and cast Bogart. Jack Warner, famous for butting heads with his stars, tried to get Bogart to adopt a stage name, but Bogart stubbornly refused. Bogart never forgot Howard's favor, and in 1952 he named his only daughter, Leslie, after Howard, who had died in World War II. Robert E. Sherwood remained a close friend of Bogart's. The film version of The Petrified Forest was
released in 1936. His performance was called “brilliant”, “compelling”,
and “superb.” Despite his success in an “A movie,” Bogart received a
tepid twenty-six week contract at $550 per week and was typecast as a gangster in a series of "B movie" crime dramas. Bogart was proud of his success, 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. Bogart's roles were not only repetitive, but physically demanding and draining (studios were not yet air-conditioned), and his regimented, tightly scheduled job at Warners was not exactly the “peachy” actor's life he hoped for. However,
he was always professional and generally respected by other actors. In
those "B movie" years, Bogart started developing his lasting film
persona — the wounded, stoical, cynical, charming, vulnerable,
self-mocking loner with a core of honor. Bogart's
disputes with Warner Bros. over roles and money were similar to those
the studio had with other less-than-obedient stars, such as Bette Davis, James Cagney, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland. The studio system,
then at its most entrenched, usually restricted actors to one studio,
with occasional loan-outs, and Warner Bros. had no interest in making
Bogart a top star. Shooting on a new movie might begin days or only
hours after shooting on the previous one was completed. Any actor who
refused a role could be suspended without pay. Bogart disliked the
roles chosen for him, but he worked steadily: between 1936 and 1940,
Bogart averaged a movie every two months, sometimes even working on two
simultaneously, as movies were not generally shot sequentially.
Amenities at Warners were few compared to those for their fellow actors
at MGM. Bogart thought that the Warners wardrobe department was cheap, and often wore his own suits in his movies. In High Sierra, Bogart used his own pet dog Zero to play his character's dog Pard. The leading men ahead of Bogart at Warner Bros. included not just such classic stars as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, but also actors far less well known today, such as Victor McLaglen, George Raft and Paul Muni. Most of the studio's better movie scripts went to these men, and Bogart had to take what was left. He made films like Racket Busters, San Quentin, and You Can't Get Away With Murder. The only substantial leading role he got during this period was in Dead End (1937), while loaned to Samuel Goldwyn, where he portrayed a gangster modeled after Baby Face Nelson. He did play a variety of interesting supporting roles, such as in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) (in which his character got shot by James Cagney's). Bogart was gunned down on film repeatedly, by Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, among others. In Black Legion (1937), for a change, he played a good man caught up and destroyed by a racist organization, a movie Graham Greene called “intelligent and exciting, if rather earnest”. In 1938, Warner Bros. put him in a "hillbilly musical" called Swing Your Lady as a wrestling promoter; he later apparently considered this his worst film performance. In 1939, Bogart played a mad scientist in The Return of Doctor X. He 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." Mary Philips, in her own sizzling stage hit A Touch of Brimstone (1935),
refused to give up her Broadway career to go to Hollywood with Bogart.
After the play closed, however, she went to Hollywood, but insisted on
continuing her career (she was still a bigger star than he was), and
they decided to divorce in 1937. On August 21, 1938, Bogart entered into a disastrous third marriage, with actress Mayo Methot, a lively, friendly woman when sober, but paranoid when
drunk. She was convinced that her husband was cheating on her. The more
she and Bogart drifted apart, the more she drank, got furious and threw
things at him: plants, crockery, anything close at hand. She even set
the house on fire, stabbed him with a knife, and slashed her wrists on
several occasions. Bogart for his part needled her mercilessly and
seemed to enjoy confrontation. Sometimes he turned violent. The press
accurately dubbed them "the Battling Bogarts". "The Bogart - Methot marriage was the sequel to the Civil War", said their friend Julius Epstein. A wag observed that there was "madness in his Methot". During this time, Bogart bought a motor launch, which he named Sluggy after
his nickname for his hot-tempered wife. Despite his proclamations that
"I like a jealous wife", "we get on so well together (because) we don’t
have illusions about each other", and "I wouldn't give you two cents
for a dame without a temper", it became a highly destructive
relationship. In California in 1945, Bogart bought a 55-foot (17 m) sailing yacht, the Santana, from actor Dick Powell. The sea was his sanctuary and he loved to sail around Catalina Island.
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." He had a lifelong disgust for the pretentious, fake or phony, as his son Stephen told Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne in
1999. Sensitive yet caustic, and disgusted by the inferior movies he
was performing in, 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. Bogart
rarely saw his own films and avoided premieres. He did not participate
in the Hollywood gossip game or cozy up to the newspaper columnists,
nor engage in phony politeness and admiration of his peers or in behind
the scenes back stabbing. He even protected his privacy with invented
press releases about his private life to satisfy the curiosity of the
newspapers and the public. 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. He advised Robert Mitchum that
the only way to stay alive in Hollywood was to be an "againster". As a
result, he was not the most popular of actors, and some in the
Hollywood community shunned him privately to avoid trouble with the
studios. But 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. High Sierra, a 1941 movie directed by Raoul Walsh, had a screenplay written by Bogart's friend and drinking partner, John Huston, adapted from the novel by W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, etc.). Both Paul Muni and George Raft turned
down the lead role, giving Bogart the opportunity to play a character
of some depth. The film was Bogart's last major film playing a gangster
(his final gangster role was in The Big Shot in 1942). Bogart worked well with Ida Lupino, and her relationship with him was a close one, provoking jealousy from Bogart's wife Mayo. The
film cemented a strong personal and professional connection between
Bogart and Huston. Bogart admired and somewhat envied Huston for his
skill as a writer. 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 subscribed to the Harvard Law Review. He admired writers, and some of his best friends were screenwriters, including Louis Bromfield, Nathaniel Benchley and Nunnally Johnson.
Bogart enjoyed intense, provocative conversation and stiff drinks, as
did Huston. Both were rebellious and liked to play childish pranks.
John Huston was reported to be easily bored during production, and
admired Bogart (who also got bored easily off camera) not just for his
acting talent but for his intense concentration on the set. Raft turned down the male lead in John Huston's directorial debut The Maltese Falcon (1941), due to its being a cleaned up version of the pre-Production Code The Maltese Falcon (1931), his contract stipulating that he did not have to appear in remakes. The original novel, written by Dashiell Hammett, was first published in the pulp magazine Black Mask in 1929. It was also the basis for another movie version, Satan Met a Lady (1936). Complementing Bogart were co-stars Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor as the treacherous female foil. Bogart's sharp timing as private detective Sam Spade was praised by the cast and director as vital to the quick action and rapid-fire dialog. The
film was a huge hit and for Huston, a triumphant directorial debut.
Bogart was unusually happy with it, remarking, "it is practically a
masterpiece. I don’t have many things I’m proud of... but that's one". The
on-screen magic of Bogart and Bergman was the result of two actors
doing their very best work, not any real-life sparks, though Bogart's
perennially jealous wife assumed otherwise. Off the set, the co-stars
hardly spoke during the filming, where normally she had a reputation
for affairs with her leading men. Because Bergman was taller than her leading man, Bogart had 3-inch (76 mm) blocks attached to his shoes in certain scenes. She reportedly said later, "I kissed him but I never knew him." Years later, after Bergman had taken up with Italian director Roberto Rossellini,
and bore him a child, Bogart confronted her. "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.
Still, for Bogart, it was a huge triumph. The film vaulted him from
fourth place to first in the studio's roster, finally exceeding James Cagney, and more than doubling his salary to over $460,000 per year by 1946, making him the highest paid actor in the world. Bogart met Lauren Bacall while filming To Have and Have Not (1944), a very loose adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel. The movie has many similarities with Casablanca — the same enemies, the same kind of hero, even a piano player sidekick (this time Hoagy Carmichael). When
they met, Bacall was nineteen and Bogart was forty-five. He nicknamed
her "Baby." She had been a model since she was sixteen and had acted in
two failed plays. Bogart was drawn to Bacall's high cheekbones, green
eyes, tawny blond hair, and lean body, as well as her poise and earthy,
outspoken honesty. Reportedly he said, “I just saw your test. We’ll have a lot of fun together”. Their
physical and emotional rapport was very strong from the start, and the
age difference and different acting experience also created the
additional dimension of a mentor - student relationship. Quite contrary
to the Hollywood norm, it was his first affair with a leading lady. Bogart
was still miserably married and his early meetings with Bacall were
discreet and brief, their separations bridged by ardent love letters. The
relationship made it much easier for the newcomer to make her first
film, and Bogart did his best to put her at ease by joking with her and
quietly coaching her. He let her steal scenes and even encouraged it. Howard Hawks, for his part, also did his best to boost her performance and her role, and found Bogart easy to direct. Hawks
at some point began to disapprove of the pair. Hawks considered himself
her protector and mentor, and Bogart was usurping that role. Hawks fell
for Bacall as well (normally he avoided his starlets, and he was
married). Hawks told her that she meant nothing to Bogart and even
threatened to send her to Monogram,
the worst studio in Hollywood. Bogart calmed her down and then went
after Hawks. Jack Warner settled the dispute and filming resumed. Out
of jealousy, Hawks said of Bacall: "Bogie fell in love with the
character she played, so she had to keep playing it the rest of her
life." Just months after wrapping the film, Bogart and Bacall were re-united for their second movie together, the film noir The Big Sleep, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler, again with script help from William Faulkner.
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." Bogart
was still torn between his new love and his sense of duty to his
marriage. The mood on the set was tense, the actors both emotionally
exhausted as Bogart tried to find a way out of his dilemma. Once again,
the dialogue was full of sexual innuendo supplied by Hawks, and Bogart is convincing and enduring as private detective Philip Marlowe. In the end, the film was very successful, though some critics found the plot confusing and overly complicated. Divorce
proceedings were initiated by February 1945. Bogart and Bacall then
married in a small ceremony at the country home of Bogart's close
friend, Pulitzer Prize winning author Louis Bromfield at Malabar Farm near Lucas, Ohio, on May 21, 1945. Bogart and Bacall moved into a $160,000 white brick mansion in an exclusive neighborhood in Holmby Hills.The
marriage proved to be a happy one, though there were the normal
tensions due to their differences. He was a homebody and she liked
nightlife. He loved the sea; it made her sick. Bacall allowed Bogart
lots of weekend time on his boat as she got seasick. Bogart's drinking sometimes inflamed tensions.
Lauren Bacall gave birth to Stephen Humphrey Bogart on January 6, 1949.
Stephen was named after Bogart's character's nickname in To Have and Have Not, making Bogart a father at 49. Stephen would go on to become a best selling author and biographer, later hosting a television special about his father on Turner Classic Movies. They had their second child, Leslie Howard Bogart on August 23, 1952, a girl named after British actor Leslie Howard.
The enormous success of Casablanca redefined
Bogart's career. For the first time, Bogart could be cast successfully
as a tough, strong man and, at the same time, as a vulnerable love
interest. Despite Bogart's elevated standing, he did not yet have a
contractual right of script refusal, so when he got weak scripts, he
dug in his heels, and locked horns again with the front office, as he
did on the film Conflict (1945). Though he submitted to Jack Warner on that picture, he successfully turned down God is My Co-Pilot (1945). During part of 1943 and 1944, Bogart went on USO and War Bond tours accompanied by Mayo, enduring arduous travels to Italy and North Africa, including Casablanca. Riding
high in 1947 with a new contract which provided some script refusal
rights and the right to form his own separate production company, Bogart reunited with John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a stark tale of greed involving three gold prospectors played out in the dusty back country of Mexico. Absent any love story or a happy ending, it was deemed a risky project. Bogart later said of co-star (and John Huston's father) Walter Huston, "He's probably the only performer in Hollywood to whom I’d gladly lost a scene". The film was grueling to make, and was done in summer for greater realism and atmosphere. James Agee wrote, "Bogart does a wonderful job with this character ... miles ahead of the
very good work he has done before”. John Huston won the Academy Award
for direction and screenplay and his father won Best Supporting Actor,
but the film had mediocre box office results. Bogart complained, “An
intelligent script, beautifully directed — something different — and the
public turned a cold shoulder on it".
Bogart, a liberal Democrat, organized a delegation to Washington, D.C., called the Committee for the First Amendment, against the House Un-American Activities Committee's
harassment of Hollywood screenwriters and actors. He subsequently wrote
an article "I'm No Communist" in the March 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine in which he distanced himself from The Hollywood Ten in
order to counter the negative publicity that resulted from his
appearance. Bogart wrote: "The ten men cited for contempt by the House
Un-American Activities Committee were not defended by us." In
addition to being offered better, more diverse roles, in 1948 he
started his own production company, Santana Productions, named after his private sailing yacht. (Santana was also the name of the cabin cruiser featured in the 1948 film Key Largo). Bogart's contract gave him the right to have his own production company, but Jack Warner was
reportedly furious at this, fearing that other stars would do the same
and major studios would lose their power. The studios, however, were
already under a lot of pressure, not just from free lancing actors like
Bogart, James Stewart, Henry Fonda and
others (who also saved taxes as independents), but also from the
eroding impact of television and from anti-trust laws which were
breaking up theater chains. Bogart performed in his final films for Warners, Chain Lightning and The Enforcer, both released early in 1950. Under Bogart's Santana Productions, which released through Columbia Pictures, Bogart starred in Knock on Any Door (1949), Tokyo Joe (1949), In a Lonely Place (1950), Sirocco (1951) and Beat the Devil (1954).
While the majority of his films lost money at the box office (the main
reason for Santana's end), at least two of them are still remembered
today; In a Lonely Place is now recognized as a masterpiece of film noir.
Bogart plays embittered writer Dixon Steele, who has a history of
violence and becomes a suspect in a murder case at the same time that
he falls in love with a failed actress, played by Gloria Grahame. Many Bogart biographers and actress/writer Louise Brooks agree that the role is the closest to Bogart's real self and is considered among his best performances. She wrote that the film “gave him a role that he could play with
complexity, because the film character's pride in his art, his
selfishness, drunkenness, lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes
of violence were shared by the real Bogart”. The character even mimics
some of Bogart's personal habits, including twice ordering Bogart's
favorite meal of ham and eggs. Beat the Devil, his last film with his close friend and favorite director John Huston, also enjoys a cult following. Co-written by Truman Capote, the movie is a parody of The Maltese Falcon, and is a tale of an amoral group of rogues chasing an unattainable treasure, in this instance uranium. Bogart sold his interest in Santana to Columbia for over $1 million in 1955. Bogart starred with Katharine Hepburn in the movie The African Queen in
1951, again directed by his friend John Huston. The novel was overlooked and left undeveloped for fifteen years until producer Sam Spiegel and
Huston bought the rights. Spiegel sent Katharine Hepburn the book and
she suggested Bogart for the male lead, firmly believing that “he was
the only man who could have played that part”. Huston's
love of adventure, a chance to work with Hepburn, and Bogart's earlier
successes with Huston convinced Bogart to leave the comfortable
confines of Hollywood for a difficult shoot on location in the Belgian Congo in
Africa. Bogart was to get 30 percent of the profits and Hepburn 10
percent, plus a relatively small salary for both. The stars met up in London and announced the happy prospect of working together. Bacall
came for the duration (over four months), leaving their young child
behind, but the Bogarts started the trip with a junket through Europe,
including a visit with Pope Pius XII. Later,
the glamor would be gone and she would make herself useful as a cook,
nurse and clothes washer, for which Bogart praised her, “I don’t know
what we’d have done without her. She Luxed my undies in darkest Africa”. Just about everyone in the cast came down with dysentery except Bogart and John Huston, who subsisted on canned food and alcohol. Bogart explained: "All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whisky. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." The teetotaling Hepburn,
in and out of character, fared worse in the difficult conditions,
losing weight, and at one time, getting very ill. Bogart resisted
Huston's insistence on using real leeches in a key scene where Bogart has to drag the boat through a shallow marsh, until reasonable fakes were employed. In the end, the crew overcame illness, soldier ant invasions, leaking boats, poor food, attacking hippos, bad water filters, fierce heat, isolation, and a boat fire to complete a memorable film. Despite
the discomfort of jumping from the boat into swamps, rivers and marshes
the film apparently rekindled in Bogart his early love of boats and on
his return to California from the Congo he bought a classic mahogany Hacker-Craft runabout which he kept until his premature death. The African Queen was the first Technicolor film
in which Bogart appeared. Remarkably, he appeared in relatively few
color films during the rest of his career, which continued for another
five years. (His other color films included The Caine Mutiny, The Barefoot Contessa, We're No Angels and The Left Hand of God.) The role of Charlie Allnutt won Bogart his only Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1951. Bogart considered his performance to be the best of his film career. He had vowed to friends that if he won, his speech would break the convention of thanking everyone in sight. He advised Claire Trevor, when she had been nominated for Key Largo,
to “just say you did it all yourself and don’t thank anyone”. But when
Bogart won the Academy Award, which he truly coveted despite his
well advertised disdain for Hollywood, he said “It's a long way from
the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theatre. It's nicer to be here.
Thank you very much... No one does it alone. As in tennis, you need a
good opponent or partner to bring out the best in you. John and Katie
helped me to be where I am now”. Despite the thrilling win and the
recognition, Bogart later commented, “The way to survive an Oscar is
never to try to win another one... too many stars... win it and then
figure they have to top themselves... they become afraid to take
chances. The result: A lot of dull performances in dull pictures”. Bogart dropped his asking price to get the role of Captain Queeg in Edward Dmytryk's The Caine Mutiny, then griped with some of his old bitterness about it. For all his success, he was still his melancholy old
self, grumbling and feuding with the studio, while his health was
beginning to deteriorate. Bogart gave a bravura performance as Captain Queeg, an unstable naval officer, 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 a paranoid, self-pitying character whose small-mindedness
eventually destroyed him. Three months before the film's release,
Bogart as Queeg appeared on the cover of Time magazine, while on Broadway Henry Fonda was starring in the stage version (in a different role), both of which generated strong publicity for the film. In Sabrina, Billy Wilder, unable to secure Cary Grant, chose Bogart for the role of the older, conservative brother who competes with his younger playboy sibling (William Holden) for the affection of the Cinderella like Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn).
Bogart was lukewarm about the part, but agreed to it on a handshake
with Wilder, without a finished script, and with the director's
assurances to take good care of Bogart during the filming. But
Bogart got on poorly with his director and co-stars. He also complained
about the script, which was written on a last minute, daily basis, and
that Wilder favored Hepburn and Holden on and off the set. The main
problem was that Wilder was the opposite of his ideal director, John
Huston, in both style and personality. Bogart told the press that
Wilder was "overbearing" and "is the kind of Prussian German with a
riding crop. He is the type of director I don’t like to work with...
the picture is a crock of crap. I got sick and tired of who gets
Sabrina." Wilder said, "We parted as enemies but finally made up." Despite the acrimony, the film was successful. The New York Times said
of Bogart, "he is incredibly adroit... the skill with which this old
rock ribbed actor blend the gags and such duplicities with a manly
manner of melting is one of the incalculable joys of the show." The Barefoot Contessa, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1954 and filmed in Rome,
gave Bogart one of his subtlest roles. In this Hollywood back story
movie, Bogart again is the broken-down man, this time the cynical
director - narrator who saves his career by making a star of a flamenco dancer Ava Gardner, modeled on the real life of Rita Hayworth. Bogart was uneasy with Gardner because she had just split from "rat-pack" buddy Frank Sinatra and was carrying on with bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín.
Bogart told her, "Half the world's female population would throw
themselves at Frank's feet and here you are flouncing around with guys
who wear capes and little ballerina slippers." He was also annoyed by
her inexperienced performance. Later, she credited him with helping
her. Bogart's performance was generally praised as the strongest part
of the film. During
the filming, while Bacall was home, Bogart resumed his discreet affair
with Verita Peterson, his long time studio assistant whom he took
sailing and enjoyed drinking with. But when Bacall suddenly arrived on
the scene discovering them together, Bacall took it quite well. She
extracted an expensive shopping spree from him and the three traveled
together after the shooting. Bogart
could be generous with actors, particularly those who were blacklisted,
down on their luck, or having personal problems. During the filming of The Left Hand of God (1955), he noticed his co-star Gene Tierney having
a hard time remembering her lines and also behaving oddly. He coached
Tierney, feeding her lines. He was familiar with mental illness (his
sister had bouts of depression), and Bogart encouraged Tierney to seek
treatment, which she did. He also stood behind Joan Bennett and insisted on her as his co-star in We're No Angels when a scandal made her persona non grata with Jack Warner. In 1955, he made three films: We're No Angels (dir. Michael Curtiz), The Left Hand of God (dir. Edward Dmytryk) and The Desperate Hours (dir. William Wyler). Mark Robson's The Harder They Fall (1956) was his last film.
Bogart rarely appeared on television. However, he and Lauren Bacall appeared on Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person. Bogart was also featured on The Jack Benny Show. The surviving kinescope of
the live Benny telecast features Bogart in his only TV sketch comedy
outing. Bogart and Bacall also worked together on an early color
telecast, in 1955, an NBC adaptation of The Petrified Forest for Producers' Showcase; only a black and white kinescope of the live telecast has survived. Bogart performed radio adaptations of some of his best known films, such as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. He also recorded a long running radio series called Bold Venture with Lauren Bacall. Bogart was a founding member of the Rat Pack. In the spring of 1955, after a long party in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, her husband, Sid Luft, Mike Romanoff and wife Gloria, David Niven, Angie Dickinson and others, Lauren Bacall surveyed the wreckage of the party and declared, "You look like a goddamn rat pack." Romanoff's in Beverly Hills was
where the Rat Pack became official. Sinatra was named Pack Leader,
Bacall was named Den Mother, Bogie was Director of Public Relations, and Sid Luft was Acting Cage Manager. When asked by columnist Earl Wilson what the purpose of the group was, Bacall responded "to drink a lot of bourbon and stay up late." Bogart was an excellent chess player, almost of master strength.
Before he made any money from acting, he would hustle players for dimes
and quarters, playing in New York parks and at Coney Island. The chess
scenes in Casablanca had
not been in the original script, but were put in at his insistence. A
chess position from one of his correspondence games appears in the
movie, although the image is a little blurred. He achieved a draw in a simultaneous exhibition given in 1955 at Beverly Hills by the famous chess Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky and also played against George Koltanowski in San Francisco in 1952 (Koltanowski played blindfolded but still won in 41 moves). Bogart was a United States Chess Federation tournament
director and active in the California State Chess Association, and a
frequent visitor to the Hollywood chess club. In 1945, the cover of the
June – July issue of Chess Review showed Bogart playing with Charles Boyer, as Lauren Bacall (who also played) looks on. In June 1945, in an interview in the magazine Silver Screen,
when asked what things in life mattered most to him, he replied that
chess was one of his main interests. He added that he played chess
almost daily, especially between film shootings. He loved the game all
his life. By
the mid 1950s, Bogart's health was failing. Once, after signing a
long term deal with Warner Bros., 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. Bogart had formed a new production company and had plans for a new film Melville Goodwin, U.S.A.,
in which he would play a general and Bacall a press magnate. His
persistent cough and difficulty eating became too serious to ignore and
he dropped the project. The film was re-named Top Secret Affair and made with Kirk Douglas and Susan Hayward. Bogart, a heavy smoker and drinker, contracted cancer of the esophagus.
He almost never spoke of his failing health and refused to see a doctor
until January 1956. A diagnosis was made several weeks later and by
then removal of his esophagus, two lymph nodes and a rib on March 1, 1956 was too late to halt the disease, even with chemotherapy. He underwent corrective surgery in November 1956 after the cancer had spread. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy came to see him. Frank Sinatra was
also a frequent visitor. Bogart was too weak to walk up and down
stairs. He valiantly fought the pain and tried to joke about his
immobility: "Put me in the dumbwaiter and
I'll ride down to the first floor in style." Which is what happened;
the dumbwaiter was altered to accommodate his wheelchair. Hepburn, in an interview, described the last time she and Spencer Tracy saw Bogart (the night before he died): Bogart
had just turned 57 and weighed 80 pounds (36 kg) when he died on
January 14, 1957 after falling into a coma. He died at 2:25 a.m. at his
home at 232 Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills, California. His simple
funeral was held at All Saints Episcopal Church with musical selections
played from Bogart's favorite composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and Claude Debussy. It was attended by some of Hollywood's biggest stars including: Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, David Niven, Ronald Reagan, James Mason, Danny Kaye, Joan Fontaine, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Gregory Peck and Gary Cooper, as well as Billy Wilder and Jack Warner.
Bacall had asked Spencer Tracy to give the eulogy, but Tracy was too
upset, so 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. 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." |