Mi Vacacion de Verano

We flew down to Puerto Vallarta this past summer. It is a small Mexican town on the west coast of Jalisco, situated on the Bahia de Banderas (the Bay of Banderas) with well- founded contentions of grandeur. It has always been known for its beaches, which run for many miles, and its forest iguanas—of which there are fewer and fewer.

Jeanne and I have taken occasional day trips to Mexican border towns over the years, but this was a full week. We lived in a mountainside villa (Villa Las Palmeras) within walking distance of the town center, in the company of our son Dan, his partner Rick, and about 25 other hard-playing, hard-drinking 30-somethings—their pals. And though it was sub-tropically hot, and in the middle of the August rainy season, since Dan had offered to fund the whole thing, who could turn down such an adventure?

Several rivers run through the town, and in the rainy season uncountable side streams and freshets tumble down through the hills and mountains that form the sheer backdrop along the coast. Intense greens and browns are the landscape colors that strike the eye. Tropical jungle foliage clings to the sides of the nearly vertical mountains. Rockslides are not uncommon—driving along its twisting main road up through the countryside is a jarring, tooth-grinding venture. Most everyone speeds, giving little care for safety. It can be fatal. Several weeks ago, a sight seeing van, much like the one we piled into occasionally, plunged over a steep embankment and crashed on the rocks seventy feet below. All eleven occupants died.

The town, viewed from the elevated vantage point of the Villa, was quite beautiful. When it was not raining, the sunsets were an orange-pink magnificence, and fireworks often lit up the night sky. To me its crowning glory is the main church in the center of town—Our Lady of Guadalupe—whose tower is in fact topped with a huge facsimile of Empress Carlota’s crown. This struck me as odd because, as you will no doubt recall, Carlota’s husband, the Emperor Maximillian, Arch-Duke of Austria, and she were installed as rulers of Mexico by Napoleon the third—all backed up by his French army. The Mexicans themselves for the most part didn’t take kindly to this colonialist incursion. Eventually, in 1867, a few years after our civil war, we told the Frenchies to withdraw their forces. Their army left, but through a misguided mixture of hubris and noblis oblige, Maximillian stayed—only to be shot full of holes by the Republican minions of Benito Juarez. My question—why would the Mexican Catholic establishment in Puerto Vallarta chose to venerate the crown of an oppressor? Life is full of mysteries. The crown is mighty pretty though.

The town itself is generally driven by a tourist economy. It is clean and cheerful. You find many jewelry stores selling a great deal of silver, restaurants of all sorts (HOOTERS and HARDROCK CAFÉ are oddly prominent), and in every third store it seemed, large signs boast genuine Cuban cigars. I bought two.

But for the glitzy storefronts, there is an ever-present patina of knife-edge poverty slipping out at the edges. The cadaverous, cleanly dressed woman sitting mutely on the steps of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, holding an empty plastic cup just a bit forward of her knee; the ever-present street venders politely but insistently plying their wares. There was no begging, but there was a definite need to sell one’s box of goods, in a town where skilled construction workers make four dollars a day—and it’s a very long day, indeed.

Speaking of the jungle habitat, Jeanne and I had good reason to know the particulars of its flora and fauna. Along with the rest of the young friends of Dan and Rick, and Rick’s parents Jessie and Merla (two people closer to our age than the rest) we went on a southbound rattly open-air camion and drove well into the single-lane dirt road raw countryside. It’s not that we didn’t know what we were getting into. The brochure for LOS VERANOS CANOPY TOUR pictures people smiling, and eventually most of us did too, after it was over. The abomination is called zip-lining.

Steel cables had been strung high in the jungle canopy upon the stronger trees. They lead to a number of platforms from top to bottom. One is fitted out with various hooks and harnesses. Eventually, one is hooked onto a handheld device that rings onto the cable, pushed off the platform with the admonition “Hold your legs straight, Senor,” as you go “zipping” down and across a 500 foot forested abyss on your way to the next way station (there were fourteen such things in all). At one really dicey point of descent I screamed, not intentionally meaning to take the entity’s name in vain—JESUS H. CHRIST!!!

By the way, the young Mexicanos in charge of this operation didn’t call me Senor—there was a certain sense of errant fun and competence in all this. They took to calling me Santa Claus—for my girth and snow white beard, I suppose. And when mis amigos Pablo y Carlos would call me that as they advised me to lift my leg and hold onto the damn rubber handles, as they hooked me up to the cable for the next terrifying descent, I would say to them, “ Que deseas par la Navidad, Chicos? (What do you want for Christmas, little boys?).” They ignored the humor of this bit of Spanish. Just as well—that was not the time to distract them.

Zipping over the terrible chasms I never looked down—always looked straight ahead, but Jeanne told me she did once. Once was enough for her.

We survived and made it to the bottom, where cold beer and DVD’s of our adventure awaited us. Paisanos offered to place a large tarantula on your neck or face, for photo ops. I didn’t bite, so neither did the spider.

More of the Villa Las Palmeras. It was an obscure, private place run by an ever attentive staff who fed us, cleaned, and otherwise saw to our needs. There was air conditioning of a sort in our rooms; mi amigo Jorge saw to the place settings and the delivery of meals, assisted by a dour-faced Jesus. .Oh! For the guacamole y frijoles de Anna Rosa—our cook. Las Palmeras translates literally to “the palm trees” and water coconut palms ringed the villa, with green coconuts ready to fall.

There was one Mexican delicacy that I had looked forward to, which I eventually discovered was not to be had in Jalisco—grilled goat (en Espanol se llama cabrita asada). Some years ago, my friends Bob and Margie Lyons told me about it, and described it as akin to a delicate lamb. Jesse and I were both interested in the thought of tasting it, but to no avail. After an interrogation of Anna Rosa and her kitchen staff en Espanol, we were given the name of Restaurante de O’Reguan situated on the corner of Collonia y Vovadilla. But before Jesse and I made the mistake of going there, we were told that the place didn’t serve grilled young goat at all. They served mutton stew. Have you ever eaten mutton (i.e. fatty old sheep)? Not my favorite. I daresay, not yours either. We were advised eventually, that we’d have to travel to Monterrey, to find it, and that it was certainly not to be found in Jalisco. Chiwawah!

22 Augusto ‘07

Tony Sanchez on the oil nut

Tony Sanchez tells me, on good authority, that the water coconut tree that grows all over town is a transplant, and the oil coconut, which produces a coconut about the size and solidity of a jai-lai ball, is the real McCoy—a native of coastal Jalisco. Tony, an escapee from Mexico City and a self-made Puerto Vallarta entrepreneur (a man with many local connections) was our van guide and driver yesterday, today, and perhaps tomorrow. Tony and his other van driver Jorge—call me “El Indio” he says—took us on the free day tour yesterday. I sat next to him and kept my mouth shut, which is the correct thing to do if you’re trying to find out something about a new place and are seated next to a person who likes to talk—a fellow who feels in his bones that he must imprint his version of philosophy and life on the assembled. It was good. Tony has a rather low opinion of the water coconut (the one that must of us think of when the subject of coconuts is brought up). Now, the little oil coco produces batches of 30 to 40 nuts—now that’s something! It’s tough as steel when it falls to the ground (God help the person who’s head it might hit). It will be green and not quite ripe. It produces an oil that is used in cooking, sun tan lotion, and has many other uses. Caramba.

Journal—25 Augusto,’07
Villa Las Palmeras
Puerto Vallarta
Cuarto Diez
10AM
A muggy summer morning (80’s) with the probability of rain later

The room’s air-conditioning is working fine, elsewise we’d be starting the mid-morning sweat—which is not really outrageously unpleasant. It IS the rainy season and this western coastal part of Mexico is semi-tropical. The concentration I put into Spanish vocabulary and relearning idioms and proper pronunciation has helped us somewhat, though it’s not completely necessary, since most people here at the villa and in town have a smattering of English. Since I sport a beard, I had hoped, as a joke, to use the phrase: Se dicen que una barba larga podra dar un aire respectable, pero ya no se usa! (They say that a long beard gives you an air of respectability, but it is no longer in fashion). But the opportunity hasn’t yet presented itself and probably won’t. The most useful phrase so far has turned out to be, ”Donde esta el bano?” [Where is the bathroom?]

A certain amount of drinking—let’s face it, A LOT of drinking, has been the motivating force driving the FF’ers (the Family Funners). In fact, for the most part Jeanne’s surprised that I’m drinking a bit less than I might normally, in such a free form environment. Two days ago though, the day of the boat trip and the diving and the beach, I had three margaritas as part of lunch on that hot hot beach, and was emboldened to sing La Cucaracha to the captain and crew of the boat, ferrying us back to port. It surprised them.

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,
Ya no puede caminar,
Porque le falta,
Porque le falta,
Marijuana pa fumar.

Thanks to Skippy of Chico’s Snorkeling/Diving and Boat trips (est. 1968), 23 of us braved the rather calm bay and headed up the coast on a large awninged catamaran. Flotillas of pelicans paddling around, and overhead, squadrons of large coffin birds looking for foods of opportunity to dive upon. Snorkeling and diving were eventually interrupted by stinging jelly fish (I did neither), but we did get a chance to view the site where John Huston filmed Night of the Iguana.

Yesterday, we (Rick, Dan, Julie, Greg, Jeanne and I, and eventually Tommy the Ear) walked a fair distance from the villa through the town and then taxied back to a scruffy part of the beach in old town where they offered lobster, mahi-mahi, or shrimp grilled on a long stick. This food vendor was right next door to an outdoor beach-umbrellaed eatery called Burro’s, whose claim to fame was their never-ending Happy
Hour. They were selling three beers in a bucket of ice for 50 pesos (five bucks), a very good price when you consider that most places charge you 40 pesos per cervesa. We spent close to two hours eating, sipping, swapping stories, and coping with a variety of beach vendors hoping to sell us everything from a song (100 pesos for a mariachi group to play three songs of our choice), to blankets (Dan bought one), to a plastic spiderman tied to a plastic parachute (we bought one for Griffin), to the ubiquitous silver jewelry.

Of John Huston, earlier in the day, we discovered the commemorative statue the town had commissioned in his honor. It sits on a small island in old town, in the middle of the roiling brown Rio Cuale, in a quiet little half forgotten plaza. Most people tour the island for its high-end restaurants and its low-end shops which feature the usual tourist crap—t-shirts, cheaply made sombreros, bad copies of Frida Kalo paintings and the like. Huston’s statue has him sitting in a director’s chair, leaning slightly forward. It doesn’t look very much like him, but one is not so much interested in his facial image as one is taken with the words that he or his family chose to have engraved on the accompanying plaque. It is essentially a portion of his eulogy that he spoke at Humphrey Bogart’s funeral in Hollywood in 1957. It went:

“He was quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him. 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 of 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.”

How wonderfully odd and personally heartfelt. It calls to mind Pop’s TIME cover story on Bogart that ran in June of 1954. I’ll attach it as a long footnote at the end of this thing.

When you consider the enormous influence John Huston had on this town, with his filming of Tennessee Williams’ NIGHT OF THE IGUANA here in ’63, bringing in la crème de la crème of Hollywood luminaries: Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Elizabeth Taylor (Liz there stalking Richard—not in the film), you can understand why there’s that monument to him. As an indirect result of the film, Burton built Taylor a home in town, the Huston’s ended up with several abodes, and the part of town where they and their retinue settled is still called Gringo Gulch, though many of the original artists have left. And the small town has an international airport that any large metropolis would envy, which was built to accommodate the Huston/Hollywood faction that inspired the steady influx of gringos.

Whereas the Spanish conquered Puerto Vallarta with the sword and the cross, the French with the rifle and imperial impudence, Hollywood seems to have overwhelmed it with glamour and monied star-power. So far, Hollywood is the ascendant victor. And no one that I met in town was exclaiming otherwise. They were simply trying to sell me 100% azul agave tequela and Cuban cigars. I capitulated on both counts.

El fin.

Boreegard—

January 4, 2008
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FOOTNOTE:





ERNEST HAMLIN BAKER



Monday, Jun. 07, 1954
The Survivor
By Paul O’Neil
(See Cover) When he advances, greasy with makeup, to his daily toil, a motion-picture actor is engulfed—profile, esthetic sensibilities and nervous stomach—in an atmosphere depressingly reminiscent of a submarine dockyard. The sound stage in which he works is as cavernous and gloomy as a wharfside warehouse. The day's set, thrown up in a distant corner as if to dramatize the phoniness and gullibility of man, is bathed in a glare of blue-white light as blinding as that from an arc welder's torch. Half a hundred hairy union men tinker stolidly with furniture, electrical cables, fuse boxes and cranes, or peer down in boredom from steel bridgework overhead. Half a hundred tourists stand in the outer shadows, looking as if their shoes pinched. Everybody talks.
The actor waits. He is essentially a gear —no matter how large and important a gear—presently to be inserted into the mechanism of moviemaking, and delay is his lot in life. He is called to walk through his part—while the babble of voices goes steadily on—and is dismissed to wait some more. He is called back to pose and turn while a man with a light meter goes over him like some latter-day Holmes peering through a magnifying glass. He is cornered by a harried female in slacks, who stares at him in distaste and pats his nose with a powder puff.
But eventually his moment comes. An assistant director with a voice like a backfield coach bawls: "Keep it quiet now, boys. Quiet. Quiet, if you please!" A gong bangs with doomlike clangor. A horrid silence falls. "Speed," mutters the man in the bucket seat of the huge Mitchell camera, peering through its eyepieces as if appalled. Then, while the 50 hairy ones look on in a sort of belligerent despair, while the tourists stand on tiptoes, while the director and servitors of the camera lean close enough to breathe on him, the actor kneels beside a chaise longue in the awful light, takes the hand of a beautiful, sticky-faced woman reclining there, and says, striving for both articulation and tenderness, "Darling . . ."
Confidence & Command. It is a type of human endeavor that calls for a soul well stiffened with ego. It calls for poise, concentration, vitality and, above all, for a kind of instinctive communion with the camera that comes partly from inner fiber, partly from vicissitude and long practice. Few possess these attributes in such full measure as that seamy, balding and corrosively sardonic old professional, Humphrey DeForest Bogart, soon to be seen as Captain Queeg in Stanley Kramer's heralded Technicolor version of The Caine Mutiny.
In the process of making 68 motion pictures, some wonderfully good, some indifferent and some terrible, Bogart has acquired a brassy air of confidence and command. There is a look of real kingliness about him as he stands, painted, costumed and toupeed ("The rug, old boy, the rug"), barking like a strangled seal to warm up his pipes before a tender scene. Veteran Director Michael Curtiz remembers with rueful admiration how Bogie, in the midst of a long, dramatic speech that would have had many an actor sweating with nerves, snarled, during a moment out of mike range, "God, I'm hungry."
Actor Bogart, now a hardy 54, is one of the most unactorish of his breed. He seems to take genuine delight in the marks of erosion that time and hard liquor have left on his face: once, after signing a long-term contract, he caused Producer Jack Warner to call for his lawyers by predicting in raucous triumph that both the Bogart hair and the Bogart teeth were sure to drop out before it ended. Prattle about theatrical art stirs him to open contempt. But he is full of surly pride in his own competence. "I don't approve," he says, "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."
Elastic & Adaptable. His work has taken him to the jungles of Africa, the mountains of Mexico, the streets of Italy and the islands of the Pacific. But come heat, hippopotamuses or hangover, Bogie will be on time for work, will absorb not only the language but the feel and importance of a piece of script in a few minutes of fierce concentration, and absolutely will not blow his lines. He is not a big man (5 ft. 9½ in., 150 Ibs.), but he can transfer an illusion of size and toughness to the screen and give his faint lisp undertones of unmistakable menace. Though he has the face of an inept welterweight, he can lend moody emotion to a romantic role. Through some inexplicable alchemy, his performance on film always comes out better than his performance on the set.
In a sense, his talent is narrow. For all his technical excellence, Bogart never gets completely out of Bogart and into the character he plays. But few screen personalities are so elastic and subtly adaptable; few stars can so convincingly and smoothly accomplish the trick of fitting a character to themselves. In an odd sort of way, as a result, Bogart manages to achieve surprising range and depth while still remaining the familiar figure with whom millions expect to renew an acquaintance when they pay at the box office to see a Bogart film.
Jaguars & Boxers. Thus equipped, he has not only survived 20 years in the Hollywood jungle but has spent a great deal of that time ferociously biting the hand, that feeds him: he is a man with a raffish compulsion to stick pins in balloons, and few of Hollywood's big shots have escaped his caustic tongue. He breaks the Hollywood taboos with equal regularity. He is a whisky drinker who seems warmed and comforted by disturbances of the peace late at night. When Columnist Earl Wilson asked him if he was drunk five years ago after an ultra-shapely young woman accused him of knocking her down at El Morocco (Bogart said that she tried to steal his stuffed panda), he replied, genially: "Isn't everybody drunk at 4 a.m.?"
In spite of being neither young nor romantically handsome, Bogart is a much-sought-after leading man who gets $200,000 for each picture he makes. He lives with his fourth wife, Actress Lauren Bacall (known as "Baby") and their two children in a $160,000 whitewashed brick mansion in Los Angeles' exclusive Holmby Hills, keeps two Jaguar automobiles (a Mark VII for Baby, an XK 120 for himself), three blooded boxer dogs, and a $55,000 ocean-going racing yacht. Mike Romanoff, the famed phony prince, wise man and restaurateur who is a sometime arbiter of Hollywood society, allows him to appear for meals without a necktie. He is president and principal stockholder of a motion-picture producing company of his own, Santana Pictures, and at times, as in Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place and Beat the Devil, is, so to speak, his own high-paid employee.
The Bogart star, furthermore, is currently on the rise. The motion-picture industry, dueling with its enemy, television, is making fewer but at the same time bigger, more grandiose and more expensive films. As in all its hours of trial, its basic schizophrenia stands clearly revealed. It must, quite obviously, make a profit, and in the face of this fact it wavers between prenatal memories of the carnival and feverish dreams of class.
Time has proved that an ex-garment maker can often produce better, more vital, more dramatic, even more sensitive movies than a Yale man. And in yearning for the benediction of the New York critics, the industry can never forget that most of the popcorn eaters who pay its bills, while being good, honest, patriotic, thrifty, well-meaning, healthy, 100% Americans, also tend to be tasteless slobs.
Automatic Excitement. What to do? Whom to trust? In Bogart the harried producer can find comfort. Bogie may bait and bully his betters, but he can act, and he is reliable. His name pulls at the box office. After his years in gangster parts, his appearance on the screen automatically seems to lend a story impact and excitement. Movie fans do not care a whit if he (unlike Jimmy Stewart and Gregory Peck) is killed during the course of a picture. Cab drivers, burglars and women admire him. And on top of all this, as an Academy-Award winner (for his part in African Queen), he also lends a film an aura of distinction.
In the last twelve months, as a result, Free-Lance Actor Bogart has played a surprising variety of important roles. He has not completely divorced himself from gangster parts—he is presently considering a hoodlum role in The Desperate Hours, a Midwestern crime story which he tried to buy himself before Paramount outbid him. Nevertheless, he has not had a gat in his hand in a long time. He not only plays a wealthy Wall-Street type (complete with Homburg, furled black umbrella, Brooks Brothers suit and briefcase), but wins the hand of lissome Audrey Hepburn in Paramount's forthcoming Sabrina. In The Barefoot Contessa, recently filmed in Italy with Ava Gardner, he is a tough old movie director.
Bottled Scream. This uneasy alliance between corseted but concupiscent industry and one of its most irascible critics is, perhaps, more aptly illustrated in The Caine Mutiny, which Columbia Pictures will release this summer. Bogart was Producer Stanley Kramer's instant choice for the role of Captain Queeg when he bought Herman Wouk's novel back in 1951—and remained the choice through the 15 months which passed before Naval objections to the tale were overcome and Naval cooperation was forthcoming. (The Navy finally made impressive sections of the U.S. fleet available to Columbia and converted two modern destroyer minesweepers, the U.S.S. Doyle and the U.S.S. Thompson, into reasonable facsimiles of that peripatetic rustbucket, the minesweeper Caine.)
Actor Bogart, a blustering, secretive figure in Navy suntans, justifies Producer Kramer's hopes. He brings the hollow, driven, tyrannical character of Captain Queeg to full and invidious life, yet seldom fails to maintain a bond of sympathy with his audience. He deliberately gives Queeg the mannerisms and appearance of an officer of sternness and decision, and then gradually discloses him as a man who is bottling up a scream.
Queeg, the audience discovers, is a man who never meets another's eyes. When issuing his fantastic orders for the roundup of every ship's key (in an effort to solve the nocturnal loss of a quart of strawberries), Bogart speaks in a normal, matter-of-fact voice, but betrays Queeg's agitated state of mind by lovingly buttering and rebuttering a piece of toast.* In the courtroom scene, Bogart's Queeg seems unaware that he has reached into his pocket and brought forth the two steel ball bearings which he habitually fumbles in times of stress, and remains oblivious of his own mounting hysteria.
Then, suddenly, he knows he is undone; he stops and stares stricken at the court, during second after ticking second of dramatic and damning silence.
As Queeg, Bogart is likely to achieve a measure of secondhand immortality.* The captain of the Caine has become almost as memorable a figure of World War II as Admiral Halsey, and legions seeing the movie are bound to remember him in years to come as at least part Humphrey Bogart. This gloss of Queegishness seems like a fitting varnish for the patina, formed by rumor, favorite scenes, old headlines, and the memories of a hundred noisy Hollywood parties, which has collected on Bogie during the years of his ascendancy as a film star.
Original Baby. Beneath the well-known Bogart exterior reposes the residue of a nice boy of good family who grew up surrounded by Irish servants in a big brownstone house just off New York's West End Avenue. The Bogarts were wealthy: young Humphrey's grandfather had invented a process of lithographing on tin. His father was a physician with a fashionable practice who knocked off for several months a year to hunt, sail and enjoy life at the family's summer home on New York's Lake Canandaigua. His mother, Maud Humphrey, a woman of queenly mien and iron will, was a watercolorist and commercial illustrator of national repute. Cuddly Infant Humphrey, one of many children painted by mother, was known publicly as the "original Maud Humphrey baby."
Young Bogart was sent to Trinity School, an old and select Episcopal institution in New York, and then on, like his father, to Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass, to prepare for Yale. But he was thrown out after three semesters for what was described as ''incontrollable high spirits." Bogart, 18, was unwilling to face his family. He hustled off to a recruiting ship and joined the Navy. He ended up on troopships and spent most of World War I shuttling between New York and Liverpool as a helmsman aboard the captured liner Leviathan. Meanwhile, the family money was dwindling away as the result of father's optimistic but ill-conceived instinct for investment.
It Isn't Easy. After young Humphrey left the service, one of Dr. Bogart's patients—a cigar-smoking, hard-drinking promoter of prizefights and theatrical ventures named William A. Brady—put him to work at $50 a week as the manager of a traveling road company. His most painful duty was paying the actors—they made more than he did. One night, hopeful of financial advancement, he injected himself into a minor role. "It was awful," he recalls. "I knew all the lines of all the parts because I'd heard them from out front about a thousand times. But I took one look at the audience and I couldn't remember anything."
But he kept doggedly on. He was a passably handsome youth, in a slick, Valentino way, and he had a taste for good clothes. He got the second lead in a Broadway play, Swifty. His performance, Alexander Woollcott wrote, could be "mercifully described as inadequate." But gradually he learned. "There's an awful lot of bunk written about acting," he says. "But it isn't easy. You can't just make faces. If you make yourself feel the way the character would feel, your face will express the right things—if you're an actor. There are lots of things. How you walk. Try walking up to a door and opening it some time on a stage. It isn't as simple as you think. You mustn't stand close to anyone on the stage. Two objects together become one object in the eye of the audience. Here's an actor's trick. Keep looking at somebody's hands. Pretty soon he'll feel like his arms are 16 feet long. He'll fall apart trying to put them somewhere. You have to know what to do with your hands. All these things—you get to do them instinctively. I admire good actors —Spencer Tracy, Clifton Webb, Jimmy Stewart, Richard Widmark—they're good."
Shock & Amuse. During the twenties. Bogart went from one Broadway hit to another as a juvenile in romantic parts. He is remembered by old friends as a "well-behaved, agreeable, serious young man," but one who had no sense of direction. Eventually, setbacks and difficulty seemed to provide him with it. He went to Hollywood in 1929 to be the Fox Studio's Gable: "I wasn't Gable, and I flopped." He came back to Broadway—to the Depression and three long years of disappointment and debt. Then Producer Arthur Hopkins cast him (despite the doubts of Bogart's friend, Playwright Robert Sherwood) in a new kind of role: the Dillinger-like gunman Duke Mantee, in The Petrified Forest.
Both Bogart and the play were tremendous successes. Bogie went back to Hollywood in triumph to play the same role in a Warner version with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. He stayed—to rebel against Hollywood's mores; to scrabble for its gold; to battle bitterly, in public and in private, for better parts; to shock, amuse or horrify his friends and acquaintances. In part he seemed bent, as his enemies charged, on playing Humphrey Bogart in public. In part he was simply making a shrewd bid for publicity, and in part he was giving irascible voice to his honest hatred of the crass and phony side of motion pictures. He also had personal problems. Life with his third wife,* Movie Actress Mayo Methot, was filled with the sound of violent argument. At times, when drinking, they clubbed each other with furniture and whisky bottles.
Meanwhile, he waged a long, stubborn, personal war of rebellion at Warner Bros, to escape from one-dimensional gangster roles. During one of his numerous suspensions, he told New York newsmen that Jack Warner was a "creep." On his return the mogul telephoned his actor and sorrowfully took him to task. "Jack." he replied, "you don't even know what I mean by creep." Said Warner: "Yes, I do—I've got a dictionary right before me. It means loathsome, crawling thing." "But Jack," said Bogart, "I spell it with a 'k.' "
Faithful Husband. But Bogart did more than protest. He proved and reproved his talent in such pictures as High Sierra, Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. With John Huston (who first directed him in 1941 as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and with whom he has made Treasure of Sierra Madre, African Queen and, lately, Beat the Devil) he gambled both professional reputation and money on his conviction that motion pictures should break away from the trite and the ordinary. Last year he abandoned the security of a 15-year contract (it had eight more years to run) and left Warner to strike out on, his own.
Increasing success and recognition—and his eminently happy nine-year marriage to Actress Bacall—seem to have made him a quieter man. Baby (actually, Bogie calls her Betty) and Bogie make no pretense of leading the sort of romantic existence which screen magazines have tagged "idyllic." Betty now refuses to put foot on his yacht. Bogie refuses to light her cigarettes (although he has gone halfway and presented her with a cigarette lighter). They have numerous, spirited differences of opinion. But despite the difference in their ages (she is 29) and the fact that both are competitors in a cutthroat business, each reflects pride, affection and great respect for the other. In a city noted for ill-concealed adultery, Bogart is famed as a faithful husband.
When John Huston asked a group of friends last year if anyone had a desire to relive part of his life, all shrugged except Bogart. who said, "Yes. When I was courting Betty." The romance began in 1944 when Bogart was starring in To Have and Have Not with Betty, who was making her film debut. Betty played a sultry siren whose big line in the movie was a hoarse "If you want anything, all you have to do is whistle." (Bogart later presented her with a tiny gold whistle.) It was a noisy courtship—conducted, apparently to the mutual enjoyment of both parties, amidst coveys of newsmen and crushing hordes of fans in Manhattan. They were married on Author Louis Bromfield's farm in Ohio in May 1945. "It was a big mess." says Betty. "Bogie shed tears all through the ceremony. He cries at weddings. He's very cute about it. It was fun. It was exciting. Bogie's a wonderful husband."
The Quiet Life. In the years since he married Actress Bacall, Bogart has not abandoned his interest in the practical joke and the convivial glass, or his feeling that there are nights when a man owes it to himself to stay up until dawn. But for all that, he leads an astonishingly quiet life. He reads voluminously, plays chess, and engages his wife at Scrabble. He often takes afternoon naps and tries hard, when he is working, to be in bed and asleep by 9:30.
None of this, however, has stopped Hollywood from speculating as to what sort of fellow he really is, or kept Bogart from supplying clues. He is willing to speak out on practically any subject.
Samples : On maternal love: "I can't say I ever loved my mother. I admired her."
On whisky: "I never drink when I work. I get loaded now and then. I don't trust anyone who doesn't drink."
On women: "They've got us. We should never have set them free. They should still be in chains and fettered to the home, where they belong."
On money: "The only reason to have money is to tell any s.o.b. in the world to go to hell."
On exercise: "At John Huston's house, years ago, a group of us played football in the living room with a grapefruit. It was late in the evening, shall we say."
On fatherhood: "It came a little late in life. I don't understand the children, and I think they don't understand me, and all I can say is 'Thank God for Betty.' "
On manners: "I have politeness and manners. I was brought up that way. But in this goldfish-bowl life, it is sometimes hard to use them. A nightclub is a good place not to have manners."
On politics: "I'm a Democrat and a liberal."
On bad movies: "I don't give a damn about the industry. If they go broke, I don't give a damn. I don't hurt the industry. The industry hurts itself—as if General Motors deliberately put out a bad car." What is the sum of these attitudes? Says Bogie of his own career: "I'm a professional. I've done pretty well, don't you think? I've survived in a pretty rough business."
* This bit of business, a spur-of-the-moment invention by Bogart, set off one of the many minor crises that developed during the shooting of The Caine Mutiny. Commander James C. Shaw, a World War II naval hero (Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima) who put in a 10½-month tour as technical adviser on the movie, objected to it immediately on the theory that an Annapolis man would never butter a whole piece of toast but would first break it into fragments. "I went to school at Andover," huffed Bogart indignantly. "Are you trying to tell me that Annapolis turns out better gentlemen than Phillips Academy?" Shooting stopped until Producer Kramer solved the dilemma by trimming the crusts off the toast and reducing it partially in size, thus satisfying both parties to the argument.
* Another veteran cinemactor, 50-year-old Lloyd Nolan, will have a share of that immortality. As the Queeg of Author Wouk's incisive The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, now playing S.R.O. on Broadway, Nolan gives a comparably brilliant performance, last week was voted "best actor" of the 1953-54 season in Variety's annual poll of Manhattan drama critics.
* His first two wives: Broadway Actresses Helen Menken (1922-27) and Mary Phillips (1928-37).
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