Humphrey Bogart

Anyone asking who was Humphrey Bogart before the fedora and the trench coat finds an unlikely answer: a child of Manhattan privilege. Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City, the first child of Belmont DeForest Bogart, a Manhattan surgeon, and Maud Humphrey, a commercially successful magazine illustrator whose income at times exceeded her husband's ^[1]. Maud used a drawing of her infant son in advertising work, and the family kept a comfortable townhouse on the Upper West Side along with a summer estate on Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York, where the boy learned to sail ^[2].

His parents planned a conventional path. Bogart attended Trinity School in Manhattan and then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which was expected to lead to Yale and a medical career like his father's. It did not work out. He left Andover in 1918 without graduating, his departure variously attributed to poor grades and disciplinary trouble ^[1]. With the United States at war, he enlisted in the Navy that spring and served aboard the troop transport Leviathan, ferrying soldiers home across the Atlantic after the armistice ^[2].

Biographers have long debated the origin of the scarred, slightly stiff upper lip that later contributed to his trademark lisp. Accounts place the injury either during his naval service or in a childhood accident, and the conflicting stories were never fully settled even by his most thorough chroniclers ^[2]. What is certain is that the Navy discharged him in 1919 with no profession, no degree, and no obvious prospects.

Bogart drifted into the theater through a family connection. William A. Brady, a producer and neighbor of the Bogarts, gave him office work and then backstage jobs, and by 1922 he was appearing in small parts on Broadway ^[1]. Through the 1920s he worked steadily in drawing room comedies, often cast as callow young gentlemen in white flannels, a far cry from the roles that later defined him. The stock market crash of 1929 gutted Broadway, and like many stage actors he went west to try films, landing minor contracts at Fox and other studios in the early 1930s without making any impression ^[2].

The turn came on stage, not screen. In 1935 Bogart played Duke Mantee, an escaped killer holding hostages in an Arizona diner, in Robert E. Sherwood's Broadway play The Petrified Forest. The performance was a sensation. When Warner Bros. bought the film rights, the studio wanted Edward G. Robinson for Mantee, but the play's star Leslie Howard insisted that Bogart repeat the role and reportedly refused to make the picture without him ^[1]. The 1936 film version established Bogart at Warner Bros., and he later named his daughter Leslie in Howard's memory ^[2].

What followed was less a breakthrough than a grind. For five years Warner Bros. kept him busy in supporting parts, usually as a hoodlum who dies before the final reel, in pictures such as Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties opposite James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson ^[3]. He made dozens of films in the late 1930s, few of them memorable, and turned 40 still waiting for a role that used more of him than a sneer and a gun.

The year 1941 changed everything. In High Sierra, from a screenplay co-written by John Huston, Bogart played Roy Earle, an aging gangster with a conscience, and for the first time a studio let him carry a picture's emotional weight ^[1]. Months later Huston made his directing debut with The Maltese Falcon and cast Bogart as Sam Spade, the private detective at the center of Dashiell Hammett's story. The film became a foundation stone of what critics later called film noir, and Spade's mix of cynicism and buried principle became the Bogart template ^[3].

Casablanca followed in 1942. As Rick Blaine, the nightclub owner in Vichy-controlled Morocco who sacrifices the woman he loves for the war effort, Bogart earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor ^[4]. The picture won Best Picture for 1943, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in the registry's inaugural year of 1989 ^[5]. Among Humphrey Bogart achievements, none has proven more durable: the film remains one of the most quoted and revived works of the studio era.

The strongest decade of his career ran from there. He starred in To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946) opposite Lauren Bacall, played the paranoid prospector Fred C. Dobbs in Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and appeared with Bacall again in Key Largo (1948) ^[3]. In 1948 he formed Santana Productions, an independent company named for his yacht, which made In a Lonely Place (1950), a dark study of a violent screenwriter that many critics now count among his finest performances ^[2]. The Academy Award came at last for The African Queen (1951), in which he played Charlie Allnut, a gin-soaked riverboat captain, opposite Katharine Hepburn; he won Best Actor at the ceremony held in March 1952 ^[4]. A third nomination followed for his Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (1954), the same year he showed an unexpected light touch in Billy Wilder's Sabrina ^[4].

Bogart married four times, and any honest account of Humphrey Bogart facts has to reckon with the turbulence of the first three. He wed the actress Helen Menken in 1926; the marriage lasted barely a year. A second marriage, to actress Mary Philips in 1928, dissolved in 1937 as their careers pulled them to opposite coasts ^[1]. His third wife, actress Mayo Methot, whom he married in 1938, matched him drink for drink, and their public fights were so notorious that Hollywood press dubbed them the Battling Bogarts ^[2].

Everything changed on the set of To Have and Have Not in 1944, where the 44-year-old Bogart met Lauren Bacall, a 19-year-old model turned actress making her first film. He divorced Methot and married Bacall in May 1945 at the Ohio farm of his friend, the writer Louis Bromfield ^[6]. By most accounts the marriage steadied him. The couple had two children, Stephen, born in 1949, and Leslie, born in 1952, and made four films together ^[6].

Away from the studios Bogart's great passion was sailing. He raced his 55-foot yawl Santana off the California coast and regarded time on the water as his escape from the film business ^[2]. He also lent his name to politics when it counted. In 1947 he and Bacall joined the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of film figures who flew to Washington to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings into alleged communism in Hollywood, though under studio pressure he later distanced himself from the trip ^[2].

Freed from his long Warner Bros. contract in the early 1950s, Bogart chose roles with unusual range for an actor of his standing. He played a cynical film director in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), an escaped convict in We're No Angels (1955), and a washed-up sportswriter investigating corruption in boxing in The Harder They Fall (1956), which proved to be his final film ^[3].

His health was already failing. A lifelong heavy smoker and drinker, Bogart was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in early 1956 and underwent major surgery that March ^[1]. The disease had spread, and through the following months he grew gaunt while insisting on receiving friends at his Holmby Hills home, where visitors included Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, and Frank Sinatra. The drinking circle that gathered around him and Bacall in those years had already acquired the name that outlived them all: the Rat Pack ^[2].

Bogart died at home in Los Angeles on January 14, 1957, at the age of 57 ^[7]. At his funeral, John Huston delivered the eulogy, and a small model of the Santana was placed with his ashes. Newspaper obituaries around the world treated his death as the end of a Hollywood era, a striking send-off for a man who had spent his first two decades in pictures playing disposable heavies ^[7].

Few careers have grown as much after death. Any Humphrey Bogart biography written since the 1960s has had to account for the cult that formed around him, beginning with repertory cinemas near Harvard that ran Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon to packed student audiences, decades before home video made the films universally available ^[2]. The battered romantic he perfected, a man who pretends not to care and then acts on principle anyway, became one of American film's most imitated archetypes.

The institutional honors kept pace. In 1999 the American Film Institute placed Bogart first on its list of the 50 greatest American screen legends among men, ahead of Cary Grant and James Stewart ^[8]. Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The African Queen have each been added to the National Film Registry as works of enduring cultural significance ^[5]. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative Bogart stamp in 1997, the centennial approach of his birth.

His influence runs through generations of actors who borrowed the stillness, the flat delivery, and the moral ambiguity he made bankable. Jean-Paul Belmondo's character idolizes him openly in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), and Woody Allen built the play and film Play It Again, Sam around his ghost ^[2]. For an actor who never played a king, a general, or a saint, Bogart left a remarkably permanent mark: proof that an ordinary-looking man with an extraordinary presence could become the movies' most trusted face.