Humphrey Bogart

• 1. Introduction

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  Humphrey Bogart kept a small gold whistle, part of a charm bracelet he had given Lauren Bacall before they married. Engraved on it were the words, "If you want anything, just whistle." When he was cremated in 1957, that whistle was interred with his ashes at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. It carried a private joke between two people. In To Have and Have Not, Bacall's character tells him, "You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow." That line, and the marriage it foreshadowed, belonged to a man the American Film Institute would one day rank the greatest male star of classic American cinema. But the actor who became Sam Spade, Rick Blaine and Charlie Allnut spent more than a decade getting shot, hanged or jailed in forgettable crime pictures. How did a teased, curly-haired boy in Little Lord Fauntleroy clothes become an American cultural icon? Why did studios alter his birthday, and why did directors who fought him still call him irreplaceable? The answers run from a Manhattan nursery to a steam launch in the Belgian Congo.

• 2. The Disputed Birthday

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  Christmas Day 1899 in Manhattan brought Humphrey DeForest Bogart into the world, the eldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey. The surname came from the Dutch "Bogaert," meaning "orchard." His father was a cardiopulmonary surgeon. His mother was a commercial illustrator who had studied with James Abbott McNeill Whistler, later became art director of the magazine The Delineator, and worked as a militant suffragette. Maud earned over $50,000 a year at her peak, far more than her husband's $20,000. She once used a drawing of baby Humphrey in an advertising campaign for Mellins Baby Food. Yet the date of his birth has been disputed for decades. Clifford McCarty wrote that the Warner Bros. publicity department moved it to the 23rd of January 1900, "to foster the view that a man born on Christmas Day couldn't be as villainous as he appeared to be on screen." Biographers Ann M. Sperber and Eric Lax pointed out that a birth announcement in the Ontario County Times of the 10th of January 1900, rules out a January 23 date. State and federal census records from 1900 also report a Christmas 1899 birth. Bacall wrote that her husband joked about being cheated out of a present every year. The family that raised him showed little warmth. Maud told her children to call her "Maud" instead of "Mother," and Bogart later recalled, "A kiss, in our family, was an event."

• 3. From White Pants To Mantee

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  "I was born to be indolent and this was the softest of rackets," Bogart said of acting, a profession he had been raised to think lowly. He never took lessons, preferring to learn by doing, and appeared in at least 18 Broadway productions between 1922 and 1935, eleven of them comedies. He is reportedly the first actor to say "Tennis, anyone?" on stage, and he despised these roles, calling them "White Pants Willie" parts. The critic Alexander Woollcott described his early work as "inadequate." Robert E. Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest changed everything. Its producer, Arthur Hopkins, recalled being taken aback at the casting, remembering Bogart as "an antiquated juvenile who spent most of his stage life in white pants swinging a tennis racquet." But the voice, "dry and tired," persisted, and the voice was Duke Mantee's. The play ran 197 performances at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1935, and Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called it "a peach." When Warner Bros. bought the screen rights, the studio first cast Edward G. Robinson as Mantee. Leslie Howard, the play's star, held production rights and cabled Jack Warner: "Insist Bogart Play Mantee No Bogart No Deal L.H." The studio gave in. Bogart never forgot the favor. In 1952 he named his only daughter Leslie Howard Bogart after the man who had refused to drop him.

• 4. The Heavy

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  "Nobody likes me on sight. I suppose that's why I'm cast as the heavy," Bogart said after The Petrified Forest made him a star but left him typecast. He signed a 26-week contract at $550 a week and was funneled into B movie crime dramas. "In the first 34 pictures" for Warners, he told journalist George Frazier, "I was shot in 12, electrocuted or hanged in 8, and was a jailbird in 9." He averaged a film every two months between 1936 and 1940, sometimes working on two at once. The better scripts went to George Raft, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, leaving Bogart with pictures like San Quentin, Racket Busters and You Can't Get Away with Murder. He considered Swing Your Lady, a "hillbilly musical," his worst performance. Of his only horror film, The Return of Doctor X, he grumbled, "If it'd been Jack Warner's blood... I wouldn't have minded so much." Through these years Bogart built a film persona: a wounded, stoical, cynical, charming loner with a code of honor. He thought the Warners wardrobe department cheap and often wore his own suits. He even chose his own dog, Zero, to play Pard in High Sierra. His candor about bad pictures, directors and producers delighted a press unaccustomed to such talk. He advised Robert Mitchum that the only way to stay alive in Hollywood was to be an "againster."

• 5. Spade, Blaine And The Falcon

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  High Sierra in 1941 gave Bogart his last major role as a gangster and bound him to John Huston, who wrote the screenplay. The two were friends and drinking partners who shared a love of provocative talk and childish pranks. Bogart, a poor student but lifelong reader, could quote Plato and over a thousand lines of Shakespeare, and subscribed to the Harvard Law Review. That same year, Huston made his directorial debut with The Maltese Falcon, based on the Dashiell Hammett novel. George Raft, contractually free to refuse remakes, turned down Sam Spade, and Huston eagerly cast Bogart instead. "It is practically a masterpiece," Bogart said. "I don't have many things I'm proud of... but that's one." Then came his first romantic lead, Rick Blaine in Casablanca in 1942, opposite Ingrid Bergman. The two barely spoke off set; Bergman later said, "I kissed him but I never knew him." Because she was taller, Bogart wore three-inch blocks on his shoes in some scenes. Bogart is reported to have suggested that Rick be portrayed as a chess player, a game he played at tournament level, one division below master. During production he began correspondence chess matches with American G.I.s by mail, and the FBI intercepted the letters, fearing the algebraic notation was an encrypted message. Casablanca won Best Picture at the 16th Academy Awards, and Bogart lost the Best Actor award to Paul Lukas. The film vaulted him from fourth place to first on the studio roster, overtaking Cagney, and by 1946 he was the world's highest-paid actor. Raymond Chandler later wrote, "Bogart can be tough without a gun."

• 6. Bogie And Bacall

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  Forty-four-year-old Bogart fell in love with nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall during the filming of To Have and Have Not in 1944, his first affair with a leading lady. Howard Hawks had introduced them while Bogart was shooting Passage to Marseille. "I just saw your test. We'll have a lot of fun together," he reportedly told her, and he nicknamed her "Baby." Their difference in age and experience created a mentor-student dynamic; he coached her, encouraged her to steal scenes, and bridged their discreet separations with love letters. Hawks, who considered himself Bacall's protector, came to resent the relationship and threatened to send her to the poverty-row studio Monogram Pictures, but Jack Warner settled the dispute. Months after wrapping their film, the pair reunited for The Big Sleep, written for the screen with help from William Faulkner. Even its makers could not untangle the plot. Chandler said Hawks and Bogart argued over who killed the chauffeur, and when asked by telegram, Chandler could not answer. In February 1945 Bogart filed for divorce from his third wife, Mayo Methot, whose drunken rages had earned the couple the nickname "the Battling Bogarts." On the 21st of May 1945, he married Bacall in a small ceremony at the Ohio farm of his friend, the author Louis Bromfield. Of their bargain over her career, Bacall recalled him saying, "If you want a career more than anything, I will do everything I can to help you... but I will not marry you." She added, "No one has ever written a romance better than we lived it."

• 7. The Belgian Congo And The Oscar

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  Katharine Hepburn suggested Bogart for the male lead in The African Queen, believing "he was the only man who could have played that part." The C. S. Forester novel had sat undeveloped for 15 years until producer Sam Spiegel and Huston bought the rights. Bogart was to receive 30 percent of the profits, Hepburn 10 percent, and both took relatively small salaries. The shoot took them to the Belgian Congo, where nearly everyone fell ill with dysentery except Bogart and Huston, who subsisted on canned food and alcohol. "All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whisky," Bogart said. "Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." Bacall came for the over-four-month shoot, leaving their young son in Los Angeles, and made herself useful as cook, nurse and clothes washer. Her husband said, "She Luxed my undies in darkest Africa." His performance as the cantankerous skipper Charlie Allnut earned Bogart the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1951, his only win in three nominations and the role he considered the best of his career. He had promised friends he would not thank everyone in sight, and his speech ran, "It's a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theatre." The picture was his first starring Technicolor role. It also rekindled his love of boats. On returning to California, he bought a classic mahogany Hacker-Craft runabout he kept until his death.

• 8. Watery Eyes

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  Rod Steiger noticed something during the shoot of The Harder They Fall, Bogart's final film. Asked why he was still on the lot after his work was done, Bogart said, "They want to shoot some retakes of my closeups because my eyes are too watery." Steiger only later understood: the eyes were watery because Bogart was in pain with the cancer. A heavy smoker and drinker, Bogart had developed esophageal cancer by 1955. He visited a doctor in January 1956 only after considerable persuasion from Bacall. Surgeons removed his esophagus, two lymph nodes and a rib that March, and chemotherapy followed. When the disease spread, a dumbwaiter was altered to carry his wheelchair, and he joked, "Put me in the dumbwaiter and I'll ride down to the first floor in style." On the 13th of January 1957, Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy visited him. Hepburn recalled Tracy saying, "Goodnight, Bogie," and Bogart answering with a sweet smile, "Goodbye, Spence." He lapsed into a coma and died the next day, weighing only 80 pounds. At his funeral at All Saints Episcopal Church, with music by Bach and Debussy, Huston gave the eulogy when Tracy was too upset to speak. "He is quite irreplaceable," Huston said. "There will never be another like him." Two years after his death, the American Film Institute rated him the greatest male screen legend, and a "Bogie cult" had already taken root at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, in Greenwich Village, and in France.