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Humphrey Bogart
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Humphrey DeForest 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; Rick 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. Birth and Early Life
He was born Humphrey DeForest Bogart on 25 December 1899 in New York City, New York, the oldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart
and Maud Humphrey, both of whom were of English descent.
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. The 1900
census for the household of Belmont Bogart lists his son Humphrey as having a
birthdate in December of 1899. 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 baby
Humphrey 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. 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. 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 mad scientist 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. 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. The only substantial roles he ever
got during this period were in Samuel Goldwyn's Dead End (1937) and Angels with Dirty Faces
(1938) (another picture in which he gets shot by James Cagney). 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." 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 ft 5
in (1.96 m). 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."
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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 ("Baby"), 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 in Mansfield, Ohio, at
Malabar
Farm, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, who
was a close friend of Bogart.
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 the harmless drunk
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, Marilyn Monroe, 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 Bacall was with Bogart, Romanoff might turn to her and say: "I see that
you are still dating the same aging actor."
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 after falling into a coma. 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.
Quotes Source:
Wikipedia Encyclopedia
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