Humphrey Bogart

The Full Biography

Humphrey Bogart. Actor. The New York rich kid who made a lisping tough guy into the century’s idea of cool, then spent a short last act as a husband who had finally found the scene partner, and a body that the cigarettes finished.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is a trench coat, a drink, a look across a piano, or a man who will not quite say he is a hero. What the still cannot show is Humphrey DeForest Bogart of New York, a well-off doctor’s son, a stage actor Warner Bros. used as a heavy for a decade, and a life with Lauren Bacall that lasted only twelve years because esophageal cancer does not care about Casablanca.

He was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City. Belmont DeForest Bogart was a surgeon. Maud Humphrey was a commercial illustrator whose drawings of babies paid more, in some years, than the practice. The household on the Upper West Side had money and not much ease. He went to Trinity School and then to Phillips Academy in Andover, which expelled him; the stories about why do not all agree. In 1918 he joined the Navy. The scar on the lip, and the lisp the cameras would treat as grammar, have been blamed on a prisoner, a splinter, a childhood, and a press agent. The file does not settle it. The voice settled it. After the service he found the stage the way a well-off son finds work when the professions do not take: small parts, a manager’s office, a living that was not the drawing room.

Broadway in the 1920s and early 1930s used him as a juvenile and then as a man who could wear a dinner jacket. The door that mattered was Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, on stage in 1935, as Duke Mantee, a fugitive who holds a diner. Leslie Howard was the lead. When Warner Bros. made the picture in 1936, Howard insisted Bogart repeat the part. The studio had wanted Edward G. Robinson. Howard held. Bogart held the diner. Warner put him under contract and then, for years, used him as the man who gets shot in the last reel. Dead End. Angels with Dirty Faces, second to Cagney. The Roaring Twenties. He was a heavy with a good suit and a short fuse. He was not yet the center.

The center arrived when the studio finally let the heavy live long enough to finish a sentence.

High Sierra (1941), from W. R. Burnett, for Raoul Walsh, is Roy Earle, a thief out of prison and into the mountains, Ida Lupino beside him. It is a gangster picture that already knows the gangster is finished. Then John Huston wrote and directed The Maltese Falcon (1941). Sam Spade, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, a black bird that is a lead weight and a joke. George Raft had turned the part down. Bogart did not turn it down. He played the detective as a man who will not be the sucker even when he is, and the picture made the heavy the lead. The following year, Michael Curtiz made Casablanca (1942). Rick Blaine, a café, a letter of transit, Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa, a piano, a toast that the Sunday broadcasts still use as a civic prayer. He was not supposed to be the romantic. He became the romantic by refusing to act like one. The picture won Best Picture. He was nominated. The statue waited.

To Have and Have Not (1944), for Howard Hawks, from a Hemingway skeleton, put him on a boat as Harry Morgan and put Lauren Bacall, nineteen to his forty-four, in the doorway. “You know how to whistle” is the folk object. The age is the file. The stills sell destiny. The file must also file an age. They married in 1945, after he divorced Mayo Methot, the third wife, a marriage the columns had already turned into a spectator sport. Bacall was the fourth. She was the one that held. The Big Sleep (1946), Hawks again, from Chandler, with Bacall as Vivian, is a plot nobody can fully recap and a weather everybody remembers. Dark Passage (1947). Key Largo (1948), for John Huston, with Bacall and Edward G. Robinson and a hurricane. He had become, in four years, the American idea of a man who has already lost and will still do the right thing if you do not make him say so.

Huston kept handing him the parts that lasted. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) is Fred C. Dobbs, gold, Mexico, a paranoia that eats a partnership. It is not the coat. It is a man coming apart in the sun. In a Lonely Place (1950), for Nicholas Ray, opposite Gloria Grahame, is a Hollywood screenwriter who may have killed someone and who is, in any case, capable of it. It is the picture actors still name when they want to say he could do more than the toast. Then The African Queen (1951), Huston again, opposite Katharine Hepburn, a river, a gin-soaked captain and a missionary, a comedy of endurance. The Oscar finally arrived. Casablanca is the climate. The Queen is the statue. He was fifty-one. He had been dying in other men’s pictures for fifteen years before the town decided he was the lead.

He drank. He smoked. He was, on a set, professional and impatient. He ran Santana Productions, named for the yacht, and made pictures he could own a piece of. The Holmby Hills Sundays were already a court. The coat was already a climate. He still took the parts that asked him to be more than the toast.

The company issued the pictures he could own a piece of. Knock on Any Door (1949). In a Lonely Place sat there. Sirocco (1951). Beat the Devil (1953), Huston again, a caper that is almost a prank. For other studios: The Caine Mutiny (1954), Captain Queeg and the steel balls, a nomination, a Navy man coming apart in a courtroom. Sabrina (1954), for Billy Wilder, opposite Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, a chauffeur’s daughter and a rich man who has not earned her. He is older than the plot wants. He plays the age. The Barefoot Contessa (1954). The Desperate Hours (1955). The Harder They Fall (1956), a boxing picture, is the last feature. He looks thin. The cigarettes had already begun the last reel. He did not announce it.

The problem with the world is that everyone is a few drinks behind.Humphrey Bogart

The turn is Bacall and the Queen: a man the town had hired as a gun finding a marriage and a statue. The years after the river were too few. Stephen Humphrey Bogart was born in 1949. Leslie Howard Bogart, named for the man who had held the studio to the contract, was born in 1952. They have had to share a father who is a poster. He did not get a long decline on talk shows. He got a cancer and a short goodbye. The cool is a lighting plot. The marriage is the life he actually wanted more time inside.

Bacall wrote the book and lived the decades after. Friends from the Santana company describe a man who liked a boat, a drink, and a script that did not lie. On a set he was a professional who hated a false line more than a long day. At home, after Bacall, he was a man who had finally been cast correctly in a life.

The later years

Home, after the Oscar, was a white brick house on Mapleton Drive in Holmby Hills and the yawl Santana, a fifty-five-foot boat he sailed to Catalina the way other men went to an office. He ran an informal court the columns called the Holmby Hills Rat Pack before Sinatra owned the phrase: David Niven, Judy Garland, Frank, Swifty Lazar, a Sunday that was lunch and a drink and a standard of talk. Bacall was the one who could match him in a doorway and then put the children to bed. Stephen and Leslie were small. He was in his fifties and still taking a mark. He was also, already, a man whose cough the stills could not light.

The work of those last years is a man using the remainder of a famous face on purpose. Queeg is not Rick. The steel balls are not a toast. Sabrina’s Linus Larrabee is a rich man who has to learn how to be in a room with a young woman without owning her, which is a joke the picture only half tells and which his own marriage had already complicated. The Harder They Fall put him in a boxing racket as a press man who still has a conscience and a cigarette. He looks, in that picture, like a man who has already been told something in a doctor’s office and has not yet told the crew. He kept the professional manners. He did not perform a farewell. He finished the shot.

In 1956 the diagnosis arrived: cancer of the esophagus. Surgery at Memorial Hospital in New York. Weight loss the magazines filed as a diet. He came home to Mapleton and received visitors in a way that was still a court — Sinatra, Tracy, Hepburn, the boat friends — and in a way that was already a goodbye. He could not eat as he had. He could still talk. Bacall has written those months without perfume: a husband who wanted the news straight, a wife who was still young, two children who would have a poster and a gap. He died on January 14, 1957, in Los Angeles. He was fifty-seven. The coat was already a climate. The man was gone. The funeral was at All Saints Episcopal in Beverly Hills. John Huston spoke. The yacht was sold. The coat stayed in circulation.

He had already, in the café and on the river, written the public man. The private man of those last twelve years is Bacall’s sentences: a husband who liked to sail, who hated a phony, who could be royal to a crew and impossible at a party, who had waited until forty-five to be correctly cast in a marriage. New York still claims the doctor’s son. The piano claims the Sunday broadcast. Holmby Hills claims a short household that knew the difference between the lighting plot and the man in the bed. The years were too few. That is not a sentiment. It is a count. Twelve years of Bacall, two children, one statue, a boat, a cough, a last picture about a fight game that eats its own. He did not get the long elder lap the town now gives a face like his. He got the work, the wife, and a cancer that does not care about Casablanca.

What remains of those years is not a decline reel. It is a man who had finally been allowed to be the lead in a life as well as in a picture, and who spent the lead being a husband and a sailor and a professional who still showed up. The Holmby Hills Sundays ended. The children grew up inside a myth. Bacall went on for more than half a century and refused, in public, to let the myth eat the twelve years. That refusal is part of his last act. He did not write it. He lived it, briefly, and then the cigarettes closed the file.

After he was gone

Every trench coat still pays him a tax. Every reluctant hero still steals the look across a room. Bacall still arrives in the same sentence. The sentence is the right one. The cigarettes are the American footnote that killed the grammar.

He came out of a doctor’s house, died in other men’s reels, took a falcon, took a piano, took a nineteen-year-old who became a life, won on a river, and died before the coat had finished hiring him. If you only remember the piano, you have the climate. If you remember the heavies, the Queen, and fifty-seven, you have him.

Portrait: Warner Bros. (publicity photo) · Public domain (PD-US-not renewed) · via Wikimedia Commons

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