Epitaph for a Tough Guy

by ALISTAIR COOKE

THIRTY years ago, toward the end of the first act of one of those footling country-house comedies which kept up the pretense that the First World War had merely grazed the Edwardian era, a dark-haired juvenile in an ascot and a blue blazer loped through the French windows and tossed off an invitation that was to become immortal: “Tennis, anyone?” Possibly he did not coin the phrase, but he glorified the type that used it, if lithe young men with brown eyes and no discoverable occupation can ever be said to go to glory, on stage or off. This young man, whose performance the late Alexander Woollcott wrote “could be mercifully described as inadequate,” seemed to be cast by fortune for the role of a Riviera fixture. His middle name was de Forest. His father was a prominent New York surgeon, his mother a portrait painter of socialite children. He himself had spent a year or two at one of the better private schools and was intended, by everybody but himself, for Yale. If the matinee matrons had any misgivings about the manliness of their hero they had the reassurance of a program note to the effect that the scar on his upper lip came from a wound received in naval combat.

Ten or more years later he gave currency to another phrase, with which the small fry of the English-speaking world brought the neighborhood sneak to heel: “Drop the gun, Looey!”

Could both these characters be Bogart, the cryptic Hemingway tough, the huddled man in the trench coat who singed the bad and the beautiful with the smoke he exhaled from his nostrils? Could any actor, no matter how lucky in his parts, how wide the gamut of his ambition, swing so successfully between the poles of make-believe represented by “Tennis, anyone?" and “Drop the gun, Looey”? He could and did. Mainly because between the nineteen twenties and the thirties the world was in for one of those ideological wrenches which, in destroying a social structure, suddenly date more symbols of it than prime ministers and courtesans, not least the prevailing fashion in romantic actors. And, coincidentally, because our tennis player had a sardonic streak in him off stage that was just what the age of disillusion ordered.

Bogart would have been the first man to question that youth ever dropped its bloom on him. But it obscured, in a smooth skin, bold eyes, and a lid of black hair, his essential character and its marvelous adaptability to one of the more glamorous neuroses of the incoming day and age: that of the unfooled “private eye,” the neutral skeptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treachery they invite. He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stage drawing-rooms of the twenties, that he was being saved and soured by Time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s New Order. Such calculations belong to social historians, not to their subjects. Not, certainly, to an actor who had had his troubles with the bartender’s tab and who was grateful to take any part for which his dark and glossy appearance qualified him. He was always content lo nestle in the camouflage of any fictional type that came his way, provided the manager paid him and left him to himself; a very complex man, gentle at bottom and afraid to seem so.

He was never earnest about the choice of parts “worthy” of him, and 1 doubt he would ever have joined group theaters or studios dedicated lo the purifying or solemnizing of the mummer’s art. He was temperamentally disinclined to identify the actor with a priest or social reformer. lie spoke his mind very freely on this as on most other subjects and he was consequently rarely idolized by aesthetes or the New Deal young as a serious actor, at least not in his own country. Hut it is a hazard peculiar to cultists in the arts — that is to say, to highbrows — that unless they keep their transatlantic signals open and alert, they tend to canonize foreign talents that are rejected on the home ground as commercial hacks. There was, I remember, a delightful period in the late thirties and early forties when American highbrows yearned for a native naturalistic actor as mighty as Jean Gabin. Their counterparts in Paris were meanwhile lamenting the early demise of Gabin as a “serious” talent and panting over Bogart for what the critic of Lc Matin called his “vitalisme, tendre et profond.”

1 once mentioned this awesome Gallic reputation lo Bogie and he was greatly amused by it. Although he privately described himself as “Democrat in politics, Episcopalian by birth, dissenter by disposition,” he looked on acting as a trade like any other, though one calling for considerable crall and discipline. He practiced it with great competence, and competence was something he admired immoderately in any field, from crooning lo seamanship, drinking to statesmanship. He was, in fact, a professional, a man who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it. Being also a clear-minded man of deep and stubborn convictions, he was something of a freak in the Hollywood factory in knowing where his craft ended and where Iris private life or his politics should take over without let or hindrance. His admiration of Roosevelt, his concern over the Bricker Amendment, his steady and withering contempt for McCarthy, had no more to do with his acceptance of a part as a Wall Street broker or a drunken sea captain than a trucking company’s contract with a newspaper publisher depends on the political stripe of the editorials.

In a fuzzier man, or a more cunning one, this separation of the citizen and the craftsman could have been a very handy sort of cowardice. Bogart was quite clear about the point where his conscience could not follow his fame. He once put into Newport, California, harbor and took his skipper along with him into the yacht club bar. An official at last beckoned him aside and intimated that a respectable yacht club was no place to bring his “paid hands.” Bogie called for his bar check and on the back of it wrote out his resignation. The effect was hardly instantaneous on the Board which, for all I know, may never have changed a rule since the time of Canute. But it changed this one a month or two later by a majority vote.

So it is fair to guess that far back in the Frederick Lonsdale era he was always his own man. lie no doubt stood in the wings in his blazer chuckling over the asininitics on stage, just as he lately complained that he could not walk the streets of New York without having truck drivers and assorted brats spring their forefingers and give him the “ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah” tommy-gun treatment. On Fifth Avenue two years ago, a wholesome young cop testing store locks at two in the morning moved up on him from behind. “Everything all right, Mr. Bogart?” Everything was fine, and Bogie sighed after his retreating bulk; “ft does no good. I haven’t played a gangster or a dick in nine years.”

But this wras his most famous self: the two-faced cynic who robbed the banker and the grafter with equal grace, who was sometimes a heel and sometimes a big-city stand-in for the United States cavalry, but. who was always the derisive foe of the law in its official forms. The enjoyment of this character from Glasgow to Singapore was assured by the supporting artistic fact that here was a universal type of our rebellious age but one that never appeared in life quite so perfect, nev er quite so detached in its malice, so inured to corruption, so self-assured in its social stance before the diffident, 1 he pompous, and the evil. It would be tempting — and the French will be tempted—to write of the Bogart character as the archetype of the Outsider, but he packed the more explosive social threat of the Insider gone sour. He was, in short, a romantic hero inconceivable in any time but ours.

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AND just what was this new sort of hero, whose originality I have hinted at in a menacing phrase or two? Looked at after twenty years’ familiarity, it is a surprise to see that he is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, as indeed are most fictional private detectives invented since Conan Doyle cast the original mold: a depressed, eccentric bachelor of vast, odd knowledge, whose intelligence is poised over the plot like a dagger, which in the moment of resolution slices through the butter of the surrounding confusion. This is the elementary recipe for all the moderns, from Perry Mason to Philip Marlowe. Where Holmes knew the soil classification of the Home Counties, Bogart—sharing an unfriendly drink with Sidney Grecnstreet — sees a ship slink by on the horizon and calls off the full-load displacement, overall length, gun caliber, muzzle velocity. Holmes possessed an uncanny sense of the whereabouts of distressed gentlewomen and had memorized the Paddington train schedules against the day of their rescue. Bogart knows all about hotels, from Yokohama to New York: the tactical geography of suites, connecting doors, and fire escapes, how to confuse the room clerk and evade the house dick, determine the clientele by a glance around the lobby, know who is up to no good and where she is likely to be.

The field maneuvers may be different from those in Holmes’s day, and the villain is more socially mobile, but since Sir Arthur we have not changed the three essential ingredients of the private eye. He must be a bachelor, with the bachelor’s harumscarum availability at all hours (William Powell’s marriage to Myrna “Nora” Loy, a wistful concession to the family trade, fooled nobody.) He must have an inconspicuous fund of curious knowledge, which in the end is always crucially relevant. He must pity the official guardians of the law.

Of course, the twentieth century Juts grafted some interesting personality changes on the original. Holmes was an eccentric in the Victorian sense, a man with queer hobbies — cocaine was lamentable but pardonably melodramatic — whose social code was essentially that of the ruling classes, He was, in a way, the avenging squire of the underworld ready to administer a horsewhipping to the outcasts who were never privileged by birth to receive it from their fathers. Bogart is a displaced person whose present respectability is uncertain, a classless but well-contained vagabond who is not going to be questioned about where he came from or where he is going. (“I came to Casablanca for the waters.” “But there are no waters in Casablanca.” “I was misinformed. ”)

As a Victorian bachelor-hero, Holmes must be presumed to be asexual. Bogart too is a lone wolf, but with a new and equal stress on the noun. His general view of women implies that he was brought up, sexually speaking, no earlier than the twenties. Hence he is unshockable and offhand, and, one gathers, a very devil with the women, who is saved from absurdity by never having time to prove it. (“Sorry, angel, I have a pressing date with a fat man.”) Unlike Holmes, he cannot claim even the castle of a carefully cluttered set of rooms. He is always on the move, and his only domestic base is a fairly seedy hotel bedroom with an unmade bed (this is called audience identification, and to tell the truth is the sort of independent base of operations most college boys and many rueful husbands would like to have). Yet somehow, somewhere, in his baffling past he learned the habits of the haut monde. And his audience is constantly flattered by the revelation that a sudden call to dine with a jewel importer at the Ritz will find him shaved and natty and handling the right knives with easy boredom.

It is a gorgeous conception, fulfilling more fantasies in the male audience than a Freudian could shake a stick at, and it was given a very entertaining dry run in the appearances of Warren William as Perry Mason. But it was always thought of as B-film material until Bogart turned it into box office. The change may have been due in the first place to what Peter Ustinov has called his “enormous presence,” the simple, inexplicable characteristic of natural stars: you cannot take your eyes off them. (No one in the history of the movies has made smoking a cigarette a more deadly and fascinating thing to watch.) It was also due to Bogart’s graduation from mere gangster parts just when parliamentary Europe was caving in to gangsters on a grand scale. He is the first romantic hero who used the gangster’s means to achieve our ends. And this character was suddenly very precious in the age of violence, for it satisfied a quiet, desperate need of the engulfed, ordinary cilizen. When Hitler was acting out scripts more brutal and obscene than anything dreamed of by Chicago’s North Side or the Warner Brothers, Bogart was the only possible antagonist likely to outwit him and survive. What was needed was no Ronald Colman, Leslie Howard, or other knight of the boudoir, but a conniver as subtle as Goebbels. Bogart was the very tough gent required, and to his glory he was always, in the end, on our side.

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THE way he came to achieve this character and its renown is a pretty irony, and he himself put it all down to luck. Bogart was just as old as the century, and by the mid-thirties he was getting to be a little too scarred for a juvenile. He would undoubtedly have faded into the kind of feature player who is never out of a job but never stars in anything and makes a compensating fuss about the size of his name in lights. Robert Sherwood had written The Petrified Forest and was looking around for what would now be called an offbeat piece of casting for the part of the listless killer, Duke Mantee. Against the advice of his friends, who remembered Bogart from his tennis racketeering, Sherwood picked the aging juvenile with the scar, the odd lisp, and the look of implied derision. He was an immediate success and was soon whipped out to Hollywood for the movie version. And that led straight to Dead End and the glory road. It proved again, what actors rarely admit, that the stars in their courses are nearly always set by the casting directors. A new view of an old face was all it took to change Wallace Beery from a slanteyed villain into a lovable cuss, to turn Myrna Loy from an “inscrutable,” as the word is understood in Oriental melodramas, into a chin-up wife for William Powell, himself transformed by the same insight from a gunman into a teasing combination of smooth operator and faithful spouse.

Soon the word got back east from Hollywood that Bogart was living out his screen character in a running series of marital brawls with the redoubtable Mayo Methot. “Battling Bogart,” the columnists called him when his divorce came up. “Battling Bogart!” groaned his oldest theatrical friend, Clifton Webb, recalling at Christmastime the shock of this fantasy. “ Why, any woman could walk all over him. The man’s a softie and — I might, add — a very gallant one.”

This true remark points to yet another “offbeat ” role that no producer had the wit to discover: the character of Humphrey Bogart himself. Only once, in Casablanca, did the audience sec a decent approximation to the melancholy man whose wryness was the mask of an incorruptibility he mocked. He drank and blasphemed and tolerated, even fattened, the newspaper myth of a locker-room tough guy. But this image was the very distorted one of a man who was impulsive and courageous in most matters of principle and was, at the same time, disgusted that our era required such conspicuous forms of protest. He advised young actors, newly transported from a success on Broadway, to “take the big part, but hold off the big house and the Cadillac, or you’ll be in hock to the studio for the rest of your life.” The only point in making money, he said, was “so you can tell some big shot to go to hell.”

When the McCarthy era was incubating in the congressional hearings on the “Hollywood Ten” he recklessly flew to Washington to defend their right to think and say “anything they damn please.” (He was aghast to discover when he got there that several of them were down-the-line Communists very coolly exploiting their right of free speech. He thought they were just freewheeling anarchists, like himself.) When it was privately murmured by some studio heads in 1952 that an open embrace of Stevenson might possibly weaken the bonds of a film contract, Bogart and his wife, a female chip off the same block, packed their bags and toured with the Stevenson train. They bowed in small New England towns at all hours and ducked out on the observation platform only when they were asked. They openly scoffed at the presidential qualifications of “the big general.” (It wasn’t Eisenhower in particular that was Bogart’s target; any general would have seemed to him like a man betraying his professional standing.) Bogart was impenitent and scoffing when he died. A bred-in-the-bone iconoclast, they called him. I am not so sure about this.

His iconoclasm was, I suspect, the rather gaudy mask of a conservatism that embarrassed him. Any rebel, said Shaw, has an obligation to replace the conventions he destroys with better ones. It doesn’t take a hellion more than twenty years or so to discover that this is not going to happen. He doesn’t exactly discover it, but he acts as if he had; that is to say, he falls back with sheepish respect on the code of his elders and mentors, the first code he had learned before he learned to ridicule it. We have all seen this mechanism in the moralizing of aging rakes, whose later Puritanism takes on the bigotry of conversion. I don’t think that Bogart had the temperament of a rake but he was an anarchist fairly young and was thrown out of Andover for “irreverence” and “uncontrollable high spirits.” He was the last man you’d expect, from his outward manner, to have the pedestrian old-school virtues: loyalty to friends, freedom from malice, a distaste for public gossip, for conspicuous wealth — to name no others. Yet he had them, knew them to be old-fashioned, and kept up his prestige among the young by cockily asserting their opposite. Hollywood’s “progress” over twenty years, he remarked, could be measured by the fact that whereas “I came out here with one suit and everybody thought I was a bum; when Brando came out with one sweatshirt, the town drooled over him.” He was very vocal about the pretentiousness of the new school of realistic actors. But I think his real complaint was that they wore blue jeans and windbreakers.

I’m afraid he would take it very glumly if he could hear me now saying, what is nothing but the truth, that he had the impulses of a gentleman but was born late enough to squirm over the vocabulary that normally expresses them. I can hardly hear him saying that fidelity to one woman is a married man’s duty. But he acted in secret on the conviction. When he had been confined to his home for many months, people used to urge his wife to get out in the evenings, once he was tucked away, He urged her himself, in an offhand way. But I think he was proud that she didn’t. A friend asked him, just before he died, why Betty had been out only half a dozen evenings in ten months. He said: “She’s my wife and my nurse. So she stays home. Maybe that’s the way you tell the ladies from the broads in this town.”

One is always reading in obituaries of men who could not abide cant and fearlessly denounced it. Bogart never bothered to denounce it since, no matter how meek its disguise, it was as plainly offensive to him as a bad smell. This hypersensitiveness to pomp made him an impossible man to make up to, to cozen, or to impress. He had the deadly insight that one meets in some drunks who are beginning to get troublesome and whom you hope to appease with cordial approaches. Such men pause long enough in their garrulousness to say quietly, “You don’t like me, do you?” So he was also not a man to flatter or — what was harder this last year — to sympathize with.

Before I saw him in the spring of 1956, I had had from a surgeon friend the dimmest prognosis of his condition, which was that of a man still receiving massive X-ray treatment weeks after an operation for cancer of the esophagus. I was sorry to have heard this, for it was going to be hard to keep up the usual banter. But there was no strain of any kind, because (I believe) he knew the worst and was resolved to rouse himself for two hours a day to relax with his friends until the end came. We never knew until he died that he had been for many months in the most abominable pain. Another of his triumphant deceptions was that he managed to convince everybody that he was intermittently uncomfortable but not in pain. Throughout the summer he remained a genial skeleton, and when I went up there the last time, at the beginning of June, he was just finishing his will. He spoke of it, and of his illness, and the sudden uselessness of money, with an entirely unforced humor and an equally unforced seriousness; neither with complaint nor with a brave absence of complaint. It is hard for actors to avoid the dramatizing of their emotional life, whether grossly by “living the part ” or subtly by sentimental deprecation. Bogart was merely himself, a brave man who had come to terms, as we all may pray to do, with the certain approach of death.

In sum, a vastly more intelligent man than most practitioners of his trade; a touchy man who found the world more corrupt than he had hoped; a man with a tough shell hiding a fine core. He invented the Bogart character and imposed it on a world impatient of men more obviously good. And it fitted his deceptive purpose like a glove. By showily neglecting the outward forms of grace, he kept inferior men at a distance. For he lived in a town crowded by malign flatterers, hypocrites and poseurs, fake ascetics, studio panders, the pimps of the press. From all of them he was determined to keep his secret: the rather shameful secret, in the realistic world we inhabit, of being a gallant man and an idealist.