Tough Without a Gun Read online

  ALSO BY STEFAN KANFER

  Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando

  Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America

  Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball

  Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx

  This Is a Borzoi Book Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2011 by Stefan Kanfer

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kanfer, Stefan.

  Tough without a gun : the life and extraordinary afterlife of Humphrey Bogart / by Stefan Kanfer.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59531-7

  1. Bogart, Humphrey, 1899–1957. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN2287.B48K36 2011

  791.4302′8092—dc22

  [B] 2010022524

  Jacket image: Humphrey Bogart, c. 1956 © Bettmann/Corbis

  Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

  v3.1

  FOR LYNN HENSON

  Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

  Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. The End Depends on the Beginning

  2. Let Me Know When You Want to Be Killed

  3. Incorrodible as a Zinc Bar

  Photo Insert 1

  4. Bogart Can Be Tough Without a Gun

  5. May You Never Die Till I Kill You

  6. Cut the Gab and Bring Me an Order of Fried Rabbit

  7. There’s Nothing You Can Do About It. Nothing!

  Photo Insert 2

  8. Storm-Tossed by Fate

  9. Breathless

  10. The Greatest Gift

  The Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Photographic Credits

  A Note About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  JOE GILLIS: You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be big.

  NORMA DESMOND: I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.

  Sunset Boulevard has it in reverse. Toward the end of the twentieth century, it was the pictures that got big. They got enormous. They offered surround sound, high-density images, computerized special effects, wide-screen galactic epics.

  It’s the stars that got small.

  This has nothing to do with ability. But it does have to do with quality—with the kinds of films that are being made, the green and undemanding audiences who see them, the bottom-lining studios that produce them, and, finally, the actors who appear in them.

  Modern leading men are well trained, skilled in their craft, buff, manipulated by powerhouse publicists. What they don’t have is singularity. Impersonators don’t “do” Tobey Maguire or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale et al. because these actors don’t have imitable voices or faces. This is in sharp contrast to the leading men of the past. Men like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart provided field days—and nights—for comedians and impressionists. And first among those equals was Bogart, the most imitated movie actor of all time. His unique, almost musical sibilance, his creased frown and rare, infectious smile gave him a quality that was at once dangerous and sympathetic. Which is why, more than fifty years after his death, he attained a summit no other actor had ever reached. The American Film Institute ranked him as the greatest male legend in cinema history. It is impossible to imagine anyone supplanting him.

  The reasons are numerous and irreversible. For one thing, films are no longer the centerpieces of American culture, the artifacts that everyone goes out to see at the same time. Not only is the attention of the young fractured by Twitter, TiVo, Facebook, YouTube, iPhones, and iPods; now there are also ways for them to catch up with new movies within months of their national release.

  For another, the collapse of the studio system in the 1960s meant that promising actors could no longer be brought along slowly. As we’ll see, Bogart began as a heavy and was slain in some twenty-seven films before he was offered a major romantic role. (“I played more scenes writhing around on the floor,” he once recalled, “than I did standing up.”)

  Demographics also play a part. Today, young viewers constitute some 70 percent of the filmgoing audience. Understandably, they want to see actors closer to their own ages. When Bogart broke through, he was forty-two.

  Finally, a Humphrey Bogart can come along once in a century: someone who isn’t conventionally handsome or particularly versatile (he couldn’t dance like his contemporary James Cagney, he looked out of place in Gary Cooper–style Westerns, and comedy was never his long suit) but who can convince an audience that whatever character he’s playing is of great importance, because he represents something vital about themselves and their time.

  “Bogie,” as he came to be called, was a legend when alive, much admired in the United States and imitated internationally by Yves Montand, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and many others. Yet, as far as stature and persona went, something even more dramatic happened after he passed away in 1957. There would be no more Humphrey Bogart pictures, and audiences had a hard time accepting the fact. They would not, could not let go of him, and their fanatical devotion made him bigger in death than he had been in life.

  In a memoir about his father, Stephen Bogart comments on the first days of that phenomenon. The eight-year-old sat in a limousine with his mother, Lauren Bacall, staring at the hundreds of mourners and onlookers assembled for the funeral.

  “ ‘I hate them,’ I said.

  “ ‘No you don’t, Stephen. You don’t hate them.’

  “ ‘He’s my father, not theirs. They don’t even know him.’ ”

  But, as Stephen subsequently acknowledged, they did know him. They still do. The actor has been gone for more than five decades, but to millions he remains a singular and ageless representative of two cities: old New York, with its gritty avenues and rude wit, its hard-nosed gin joints and occasional grace notes; and old Hollywood, with its big-studio glamour, shadowy film noirs, and tight-lipped, uncompromisingly male superstars. His outstanding characteristics—integrity, stoicism, a sexual charisma accompanied by a cool indifference to women—are never out of style when he’s on-screen, and he is still on-screen all the time.

  Humphrey Bogart was born in 1899; thus his life and posthumous reputation span three centuries. That claim could be made for only two other iconic Hollywood figures: Charlie Chaplin, born in 1889, and Fred Astaire, born the same year as Bogart. But the former was a director as well as a performer; and the latter was, of course, a dancer first and an actor second. Bogart had only one string on his bow. Yet he has provided the most enduring mark and remains the most forceful presence. Why is that true after all these years? The reasons could make a book.

  CHAPTER 1

  The End Depends on the Beginning

  i

  In the 150-year history of cinema, few performers have arrived with a more impressive résumé of monetary privilege and social distinction. Humphrey Bogart’s father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a high-toned graduate of Phillips Andover prep school and Columbia University; his medical degree came from Yale. Belmont rarely failed to inform classmates and collea
gues that the Bogarts of Holland were among the earliest settlers in New York, and that one of their ancestors was the first “European” child to be born in that state.

  Actually, the Bogarts had been a line of burghers and truck farmers until Belmont’s father, Adam, came along. He married late, became an innkeeper to support his wife and child, and compulsively tinkered in his off-hours. Lithography—etching on large, unwieldy stones—had become popular in the later nineteenth century; Adam seized the day, creating a process for transfering lithographs to portable sheets of tin. Printers wanted in on this new invention, and the sales made him a rich man. It was a classic case of an old family with new money, very much in the spirit of the nineteenth century. Adam relocated to Manhattan, taking comfort in the knowledge that many a New York City plutocrat had humble beginnings: Jacob Astor started out as a fur trapper; Peter Schermerhorn as a ship chandler; Frederick and William Rhinelander as bakers; Peter Lorillard as a tobacco merchant.

  Adam maneuvered the family name into the Blue Book of New York City society and, after his wife died, concentrated all his energy and ambition on his only son. There would be no hayseed in this boy’s hair; no scent of the carbolic acid used to clean hotel rooms would cling to his clothes as it had to his father’s. Adam was sharply aware of Power of Personality, a book by the business writer Orison Swett Marden. “In this fiercely competitive age,” warned the author, “when the law of the survival of the fittest acts with seemingly merciless rigor, no one can afford to be indifferent to the smallest detail of dress, or manner, or appearance, that will add to his chance of success.” Adam’s son was caparisoned in the right wardrobe, sent to the best private schools, given a generous allowance. Pushed and prodded to get on in this ruthless new world, Belmont aimed high. Early on, he made up his mind to major in science and biology, get admitted to Yale Medical School, and then forge his own reputation as a physician. By his early thirties Dr. Bogart had realized his goals, serving on the staffs of three prominent Manhattan hospitals: Bellevue, St. Luke’s, and Sloan.

  During that time, however, an accident wholly altered his life. He was riding in a horse-drawn ambulance when the animal got spooked in traffic, reared, and overturned the vehicle. Belmont’s leg was broken, badly set, and then reset to correct the original errors. Morphine and other drugs were prescribed to lessen the misery. He leaned on them to get through the nights.

  Still, he was tall, slim, and attractive; sporting a cane, he continued to make his professional rounds and attend parties, customarily introduced as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors. It was at one of those preaccident fêtes that the thirty-year-old medical man had met the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Rochester, New York, stove salesman. Maud Humphrey was almost Belmont’s height, not quite beautiful, but striking, with russet hair, a determined jaw, and a slender, shapely figure. She was also famous. At the age of sixteen the art prodigy had sold drawings to magazines. After studying in Paris and New York she caught on as an illustrator of calendars, children’s books, and advertisements for Ivory soap and Metropolitan Life Insurance. Everywhere Belmont looked, he saw her pictures.

  In their intelligent study, Maud Humphrey: Her Permanent Imprint on American Illustration, Karen Choppa and Paul Humphrey suggest that, skilled as she was, Maud owed much of her early success to industrial timing. Just as Enrico Caruso came along when single-sided wax recordings were being mass-produced, so Maud’s meticulous water-color technique turned out to be ideal for the brand-new methods of lithographic reproduction. Her renderings of moppets and misses were sentimental without being cloying, and expertly done; they made her the best-known illustrator of her time. When she and Belmont Bogart first met, he was drawing a yearly salary of twenty thousand dollars, an excellent sum in those days. Maud Humphrey was already earning more than twice as much.

  A liaison began, interrupted by Maud’s militant feminism: Belmont’s nineteenth-century, male-centered view made the suffragist uncomfortable. They broke off. Two years later she heard about his accident and dropped by to express her sympathy. She paid another call, and another, and another. During one rendezvous the pair abruptly decided that personal politics be damned, they could not live without each other. A week later an item appeared in the Ontario County Times of June 15, 1898. It explained that in view of Dr. Bogart’s indisposition,

  Miss Humphrey thought she would rather nurse her husband through his trial than visit him duly chaperoned at stated intervals, so about the middle of the week the young couple announced casually that they were going to be married Saturday, and they were, with only a handful of cousins to give away the orphaned artist. The honeymoon will be spent in a hospital. Mrs. Bogart, nee Humphrey, is a connection of Admiral Dewey, and is also related to the Churchills and the Van Rensselaers.

  The newlyweds bought a four-story town house at 245 West 103rd Street, between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, then a toney address. Down the hill was Riverside Park, leading to the mile-wide Hudson River and the picturesque craggy Palisades; across the street was the Hotel Marseille, city home of folks like Sara Roosevelt, mother of the future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Bogarts had four live-in help (two maids, a cook, and a laundress); their combined salaries added up to less than twenty dollars a week. In 1899, Maud gave birth to the Bogarts’ first child and only son. He had something of his father’s dark coloring, modified by his mother’s delicate bone structure. The boy was christened with her maiden name, and there was great rejoicing. Before Humphrey was out of swaddling clothes Belmont made plans to enter him at Phillips Andover, predicting that someday young Bogart would become a doctor, like his old man. Over the next five years two daughters were added to the family. In keeping with Maud’s progressive outlook, all three children were instructed to address her by her first name. None of them ever called her “Mother.” She was not a great believer in hugs, either. A pat on the back or a soft clip on the shoulder was her way of showing affection. Belmont was undemonstrative as well, but this was in keeping with a man of his class and period. Thus he had enormous expectations of his handsome son; thus he assumed that Frances and Catherine would simply marry well and raise their own families. Maud demurred. They could have lives and jobs of their own; a new day was dawning for women. It was the beginning of many arguments about the family, and about life itself.

  For more than a decade the three little Bogarts enjoyed an atmosphere of ostentatious comfort, surrounded by reproductions of classical statues, heavy tapestries, and overstuffed horsehair couches and chairs. They played with the latest toys, were luxuriously togged, and ate the best food money could buy. When Maud and Belmont dined out, it was at stylish restaurants like Delmonico’s and the Lafayette, but those occasions were rare; they were around the house much of the time. The doctor received patients in a mahogany-lined office on the first floor, and the artist did her work in a studio at the top of the house. On many occasions she sketched and painted until after midnight, when the only sound was the cooing of pigeons on the roof. Belmont raised them in his spare time; it was one of his many hobbies. His favorite avocation was sailing, something he had done as a youth. To that end, the Bogarts acquired an estate on the exclusive shore of Canandaigua Lake, one of the long, wide Finger Lakes in upstate New York. Willow Brook’s fifty-five acres contained a working farm, an icehouse, and broad lawns leading down to the dock where Belmont kept a yacht he called the Comrade.

  So far, so Edwardian. Yet there were cracks in this grand façade, imperceptible to most outsiders but sadly apparent to Humphrey, Frances, and Catherine. For Maud and Belmont were running out of mutual affection. It was not a question of lovers or mistresses. They had gradually, and then not so gradually, grown apart, vanishing into their professional obligations and political beliefs, into alcohol, and, in Belmont’s case, into morphine addiction. They fought much of the time, usually behind closed doors. But in hot weather secrets could not be kept so easily. Maud suffered from migraine headaches, and through the open w
indows her throaty voice could be overheard by neighbors, bawling out the children for some trivial misbehavior. Her outbursts were often followed by Belmont’s own tantrums. Those could lead to harsh corporal punishment; like his father before him, Belmont was a believer in the razor strop as an instrument of moral instruction. At Willow Brook the children’s lives veered between the terror of evening quarrels and the delights of lyrical summer afternoons.

  For Humphrey, some of the pleasure came from his newfound role as leader of the Seneca Point Gang. This was a self-styled group of adolescent boys who addressed him as “Hump,” a nickname he found congenial. They skinny-dipped in local streams, built their own clubhouse of spare planks, played war with lead soldiers, and put on amateurish stage plays at the lakefront beach. There was nothing remarkable about these productions except for the costumes. They were the real thing, Broadway discards donated by William Aloysius Brady, a patient of Dr. Bogart’s.

  Despite his Irish-sounding name, Bill Brady was a Jewish theatrical producer. At a time when New York society referred to Jews by such code references as NOKD (Not Our Kind, Darling) and restrictive covenants barred “Hebrews” from certain city neighborhoods, the Bogarts displayed few of the standard social biases. Maud was uncomfortable with Jews, but she considered herself a freethinker and a realist. One had to get along with all sorts of people these days. Belmont liked the idea of befriending a man who had managed two undisputed heavyweight champions, James Corbett and James Jeffries, bankrolled touring companies, married the glamorous actress Grace George, and owned the Playhouse Theater on 48th Street. Brady’s son, Bill Jr., was an occasional houseguest and honorary gang member; more often he and Humphrey formed their own mini-gang back in the city, where they checked out Sarah Bernhardt and W. C. Fields at the Palace, broke up at the antics of Chaplin and Keaton, and gazed approvingly at the manly images of John Barrymore and Francis X. Bushman in nickelodeons. Bill Sr. had little use for movies—he told the boys they were a passing fad, full of exaggerated gestures by overemoting hambones. He was fond of quoting the director Marshall Neilan: “The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures.”