Bogart (13 page)

In 1943 came the next big magnification of the Bogart
star. It was my father’s forty-fifth movie,
Casablanca,
which,
even though it won the Oscar for best picture, has been
called “the best bad movie ever made.” It is also, of my father’s five most important films, the only one that was not
written or directed by John Huston. Alistair Cooke says, “Bo
gie’s continuing fame is a mystery but a lot of it is tied up in that film,
Casablanca
.”

“Casablanca
was never supposed to be anything special,”
Julius Epstein told me. Epstein, along with his twin brother,
Philip, and Howard Koch, wrote the screenplay. “In those
days the studios owned the theaters and each studio made a
picture a week.
Casablanca
was just one more picture. It was
corny and it was sentimental, and your father made a lot of
better films that don’t get as much attention. But somehow magic happened and it became a classic.”

Epstein went on to say, “The first preview was not a howl
ing success. The movie did not become the cult film it is now
until after your father died.”

Though
Casablanca
went on to win the Academy Award
for Best Picture and Best Director, and my father got his first
Best Actor nomination, the road to being a classic was not a
smooth ride. “We were making changes in the script every
day during shooting,” Epstein says. “Your father didn’t like
that. He was a professional, always prepared, and he didn’t
like sloppiness. But that’s what it was. We were handing in di
alogue hours, even minutes, before it was to be shot.”

No one really knew where the picture was going or how
it was going to end. All of this, of course, raised havoc with
characterizations. Ingrid Bergman recalls in her book,
My
Story,
“Every morning we said, ‘Well, who are we, what are we
doing here?’ And Michael Curtiz, the director, would say,
‘We’re not quite sure, but let’s get through this scene today and we’ll let you know tomorrow.’”

In fact, the famous ending of the movie where my father
says to Claude Rains, “Louis, I think this is the beginning of
a beautiful friendship,” was not the only ending planned. Curtiz also planned to shoot an ending in which Bergman
stays with Bogart. It was only after the “beautiful friendship”
line was shot that Curtiz knew he had something perfect and
decided to go with it.

It was a difficult movie for my father. He spent most of
his time in his trailer. He was not happy with the part at first.
He wanted to get the girl, but so did Paul Henreid, because
that, to some extent, was the definition of stardom: the guy
who got the girl was the star. But Bogie also worried that
the public would not believe that a woman as beautiful as In
grid Bergman could fall for a guy who looked like him. He
was, after all, a five-foot-ten, 155-pound, forty-four-year-old,
balding man who had spent most of his film life playing
snarling triggermen.

Dad was also troubled by the fact that, in the original
script, Rick Blaine was a bit of a whiner, and that Rick didn’t
actually
do
much of anything. So the role was beefed up.

The role became more challenging. Dad had to con
vince his audience that Rick was a man’s man, a tough guy,
but that he also could be brought close to tears by the sound
of “As Time Goes By” played on the piano by Dooley Wilson
as Sam. (By the way, Bogie never said, “Play it again, Sam.”)

My father, I have learned, was not a ladies’ man, in real life, or on film. In fact, his aloofness with women on screen, the ease with which he could turn a dame into the cops if she
was bad, is one of the things that makes him attractive both
to men and women.
Casablanca
was probably his most ro
mantic role, and even then most of the romance is in the
back story.

Bogie, with not a lot of experience in romantic parts,
took advice on how to play it. His friend Mel Baker told
him, “This is the first time you’ve ever played the romantic
lead against a major star. You stand still, and always make her
come to you. Mike [Curtiz, the director] probably won’t notice it, and if she complains you can tell her it’s tacit in the
script. You’ve got something she wants, so she has to come
to you.”

Whatever my father did worked.
Casablanca
turned Bogie
into a sex symbol. As Rick Blaine he represented one of what
Ingrid Bergman called “the two poles of male attractiveness.” Paul Henreid as Victor Laszlo was the other. Laszlo was hon
est, responsible, conservative, and fatherly. Bogie, as Rick,
was sexy, romantic, irresponsible, and funny. In other words:
dangerous. Women love rascals.

“I didn’t do anything I’ve never done before,” Bogie
said, “but when the camera moves in on that Bergman face,
and she’s saying she loves you, it would make anybody look romantic.”

In fact, the chemistry between my father and Bergman
was so palpable that many people thought they must have
had something going on off the screen. But the truth is they
were practically strangers.

“I kissed him,” Bergman says, “but I never knew him.”

Bob Williams, who was the studio’s publicist on the film,
has said that he thinks my father was in love with Ingrid
Bergman, and that a romance might have developed if he
were not married to the fanatically jealous Mayo Methot at
the time. “Bogie was kind of jealous if I would bring another
man onto the set to see her,” Williams says. “He would sulk.
I think he was kind of smitten with her.”

Perhaps. But my father was not the kind to flirt with his
costars. He was more inclined to retire to his trailer and study
his script or play chess, in this case with Howard Koch.

Nobody can say for sure why
Casablanca
has become the
beloved film that it is, or why so many lines from it have be
come installed in our language. All I know is that I would be
a very rich man if I got a quarter every time somebody said
to me, “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” or
“We’ll always have Paris,” or “Here’s looking at you, kid,” or
“Of all the gin joints in all the world,” and on and on. Barely
a day goes by that I don’t see or hear some reference to Bo
gie on the news, and most commonly it is one of the
Casablanca
lines. Even Secretary of State Warren Christopher summed up his comments on the GATT Treaty: “This could
be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

Casablanca
was truly a serendipitous combination of things.
But if the soul of my father’s fame is the merging of his
real self with his screen image, as film historians have sug
gested, then
Casablanca
probably is the best example of
that merging.

Perhaps this is the phenomenon that Bergman is talking about when she writes that she came to Hollywood troubled
by the fact that in Hollywood you were expected to play some
version of yourself in every film. She was from Sweden where
actors played different ages, different ethnic groups, people
very different from who they really were. She says that Mi
chael Curtiz told her, “American audiences pay their money
to see Gary Cooper being Gary Cooper, not the Hunchback
of Notre Dame.” Rick Blaine was not a clone of Humphrey
Bogart, but he was a hell of a lot closer to being my father
than any of those gun-toting gangsters ever had been.

Richard Schickel puts it this way: “What Bogart found in Rick Blaine was something more interesting than Tough Guy,
no less complex than Existential Hero, but much more
appealing—to some of us, at least—than both. For Rick was
but a minor variation on the role Bogart had himself been
playing most of his adult life. A role he had taken up with
particular relish when he made his permanent residence in
Hollywood. It was the role of Declassed Gentleman. A man of
breeding and privilege who found himself far from his native
haunts, among people of rather less quality, rather fewer
standards morally, socially, intellectually, than he had been
raised to expect to find among his acquaintances. Rick Blaine
should not have ended up running a gin joint in
Casablanca,
and Humphrey Bogart should not have ended up being an
actor in Hollywood.”

I think Curtiz and Schickel are, at least partially, right. The movie stars who endure, including my father, often play a big part of themselves. Nonetheless, the next three impor
tant films in the Bogie cult were movies in which Dad played
parts much further from himself than Rick Blaine or Sam
Spade were.

In
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
which is my favorite, Dad
was no confident, highly principled Sam Spade. He played a
paranoid gold prospector. Huston directed and had a cameo
part. Walter Huston, John’s father, was in the film and he
won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
while John was winning the Oscar for Best Director. My fa
ther got his second Oscar nomination for that film.

While this was one of my father’s favorite roles, Sam Jaffe
says that Bogie had some reservations at first.

“Your father came to me one day and said, ‘Have you read the script for
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
?
’ I said yes.
He made a face. I said, ‘Bogie, I can see that something’s bothering you.’ It seemed to me that he was concerned about
the size of the part, since he had already done
The Maltese Falcon
and
Casablanca
by this point. I said to him, ‘I don’t know
if you are considering not doing this, but you’re a great
friend of John Huston and you have great respect for Walter
Huston. There is nothing wrong with being second in a
movie that stars Walter Huston and is directed by John
Huston. You may have some doubts, but let me say that if you
don’t do this picture, it won’t get made because they won’t
make a picture with Walter and another actor. And what will
happen to your relationship with John Huston? You will
crush John. I want to relieve your mind that you will not be
hurt by playing in this movie. You’ll be good in the picture
and people will not say, Oh, Bogie’s not important anymore
because he is being second to Walter Huston.’”

John Huston, of course, was a major force in my father’s
career. Perhaps
the
major force. It would be Huston, of
course, who would later direct Bogie in
The African Queen,
the
last of the five films which I think are mainly responsible for
my father’s fame.

Of course, these five films only make up one-fifteenth of my father’s film work. Everybody I meet has a favorite. A lot
of people like
The Big Sleep,
which I can’t make heads or tails
of. Some people favor the other Bogie and Bacall movies, like
To Have and Have Not
and
Key Largo,
the latter of which was
also directed by Huston. And there are people who just love
those old gangster movies, especially
The Roaring Twenties
and
They Drive By Night.
Still I think it was those five:
High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,
and
The African Queen,
which are most responsible for mak
ing my father the most famous movie star in the world.

Tracing the arc of my father’s fame is a lot easier than understanding it. I see him kind of moving along from film to film
like an airplane gaining speed, then finally lifting off into
stardom. But then there is a moment when he seems to go
into the stratosphere, breaking away from the pull of gravity
which holds the rest of us on earth. We can, more or less, fig
ure out when it happened, but nobody can say for sure why
it happened.