Tough without a gun The life and extraordinary afterlife of Humphrey Bogart

Review by Choice Review

This most recent of some two dozen biographies of film-actor-par-excellence Humphrey Bogart provides an engaging, nicely contextualized narrative about the actor's career and private life. Kanfer is a former Time magazine film critic and author of several biographies of popular culture icons--Groucho Marx (Groucho, CH, Feb'01, 38-3227), Lucille Ball (Ball of Fire, Mar'04, 41-3937), Marlon Brando (Somebody, CH, Apr'09, 46-4325). He naturally focuses on Bogart's more than 70 films, giving some attention to topics covered in previous biographies (his earlier stage career, privileged though troubled childhood, and subsequent personal relationships, including four marriages). So why another biography? The ostensible answer is that Kanfer explains Bogie's rise to stardom as Hollywood's premier tough guy and then his enduring popularity. Given Bogart's unforgettable roles--from Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1941) to Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (1954)--one has no difficulty understanding why he endures. Kanfer devotes only two brief chapters to explaining Bogart's status as an irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind film icon. The subject requires further exploration. Kanfer eschews traditional documentation but provides an adequate bibliography and many illustrations. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers only. D. B. Wilmeth emeritus, Brown University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

HAS any leading man ever made women work so hard to get his attention? There he is, just minding his own business when along comes some dame who gets it in her head that they should fall in love. She flirts with him, kisses him first, talks back when he tells her off, stays when he buys her a ticket to go. He puts up a fight with all the grim resolve of a guy closing the shutters on a storm that's about to raze his house. Sooner or later, the dame, who happens to be beautiful, wears him down and he comes around, against his better judgment. Humphrey Bogart's shell was "a carapace," as Stefan Kanfer writes about one of his roles, "meant to cover the psychic injuries of a decent man trying to forget the past." Experience had engraved itself on his face. By the time his film breakthrough came, he was 42 and already wearing the vestiges of betrayal, loss and resignation that would bring the shadow of a back story to every role he played. Photographs of Bogart in the 1920s, when he was in his 20s, show a bright-eyed, smooth-cheeked actor whose features haven't set yet. The transformation took place before we made his acquaintance. The Bogart we came to know on the screen was mature when he arrived, with compressed emotions, an economy of gesture and a compact grace in movements that were wary and self-contained, as if all the world were not a stage but a minefield. Kanfer's book takes its title from Raymond Chandler, who approved of the decision to cast Bogart in "The Big Sleep" as Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled detective he had created, because Bogart could be "tough without a gun." Kanfer recounts Bogart's own back story, the life that loomed just behind the acting. Such a steady diet of disappointment, failure and alcohol would be enough to relieve any man of his hopes and disabuse him of his faith in human nature. The star who made a name for himself playing gangsters, convicts, private investigators and boat captains for hire came from a family in the New York social register. The son of Belmont DeForest Bogart, a physician and a graduate of Columbia and Yale, and Maud Humphrey, he repeatedly failed to live up to his parents' expectations and flunked out of prep school at Andover. A stint in the Navy in World War I brought time in the brig, a demotion in rank and no action overseas. As an actor, he found work on the stage, but fame eluded him; between jobs, be played chess for 50 cents a game in the arcades on Sixth Avenue. His father became addicted to morphine and died leaving $10,000 in i.o.u.'s, which Bogart paid. His three disastrous marriages before the one to Lauren Bacall fell into a pattern of professional rivalry (his wives were all actresses) and resentment, sometimes building to loud late-night arguments punctuated by flying ashtrays and the sound of broken glass. (His third wife, Mayo Methot, whom he nicknamed Sluggy, stabbed him with a knife.) Time and again, Bogart was cast as a man of principle, and his finest qualities are on display in "Tough Without a Gun": his decency and courage in championing Fatty Arbuckle, Peter Lorre, Joan Bennett and Gene Tierney when they were in dire straits and out of favor; his generosity to charities; his integrity in a town where promises were forgotten, not kept. Still, some angles are unbecoming. Crusading against the witch hunt conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, he flew to Washington along with colleagues from the movie business to testify in defense of the First Amendment, but later rescinded his support when he discovered that several of his fellow protesters had in fact been affiliated with the Communist Party. When his mother, an emotionally distant feminist, died after a long career as one of the most successful commercial illustrators of the time, he listed her occupation as "housewife" on the death certificate. Insistent on Bacall's fidelity, he carried on a long affair with his personal hairdresser. And then there was the drinking. In an era when people drank a lot, Bogart drank more. "The whole world is about three drinks behind," he complained. Not that he was willing to pause and wait for the world to catch up. He drank right along with Mayo during her steep descent into alcoholic psychosis. As one of the founding members of the Rat Pack (christened by Bacall), he built the booze into his charisma. So strong is the force of Bogart's presence on screen that his performances induce a kind of double vision: we're watching Rick, or Sam Spade, or Captain Morgan, and Humphrey Bogart at the same time. Kanfer, who has written biographies of Groucho Marx, Lucille Ball and Marion Brando, is at his best examining the ways Bogart's life and his performances converged. His WASP roots paradoxically worked in his favor in gangster roles, Kanfer contends. While Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson claimed the ethnic ends of the spectrum, representing "immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who had taken a wrong turn," Bogart stood in for Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow - "notorious malefactors from the heart of the heart of the country." The sudden violent flashes of anger, the bitter sense of defeat running jusl beneath the stoic surface seem to have been imported wholesale from Bogart's life into the role of Dixon Steele, the broken-down screenwriter at the vortex of "In a Lonely Place." Bogart screened "A Star Is Born" (the Janet Gaynor-Fredric March version) every year on his birthday, "with tears streaming down his face at the fate of Norman Maine," a former matinee idol down on his luck and forgotten. "I expected a lot more of myself," Bogart told the writer and director Richard Brooks, who was present on several of these occasions, "and I'm never going to get it." Kanfer's bibliography lists two dozen books devoted to Bogart, and that's not counting the study of his mother's work or the memoirs of his colleagues. Why another one, and why this one? Kanfer makes the case, mustering superlatives: Bogart, "the most imitated movie actor of all time," "the highest-paid actor in the world" (in 1946), "the most important American film actor of his time and place." And, evidently, the most influential from beyond the grave: in his "extraordinary afterlife," Bogart has inspired Jean-Luc Godard and Jean- Paul Belmondo ("Breathless"), François Truffaut ("Shoot the Piano Player"), Woody Allen ("Play It Again, Sam"), Mos Def and Taye Diggs ("Brown Sugar") and Thomasville Furniture (the Trench Coat Chair). Bogart's enduring place in the culture has been secured not only by his skills as an actor, Kanfer argues, but by our chronic nostalgia for his brand of masculinity. A chorus of sources in the industry confirms the recent dearth of the "man's man." Kanfer agrees that there will never be another Bogart, that there can't be another Bogart, but not - or not only - because guys have gone all sensitive and tentative. Instead, he attributes the demise of manhood as a Hollywood ideal to the demographic shift in audiences and lists as evidence the 20 top-grossing films of all time, from "Avatar" to "Finding Nemo" - every one of them aimed at a junior audience. He cites results of surveys that measure filmgoing by age, with those in the 14-17 category seeing more than twice as many movies as those over 50. "Small wonder, then," he concludes, "that producers keep coming up with products that border on the puerile - and with boymen to star in them." This makes sense but goes only so far. Consider the recent spate of late-middle-age romantic comedies and end-of-life buddy films, clearly intended for the boomer market and featuring Jack Nicholson, that superannuated adolescent, and other leading men soon to be eligible for Medicare, playing characters in whom an inability to commit and bewilderment at the state of their own lives are meant to be endearing. THE real reason there will never be another Bogart lies embedded in Kanfer's account of his career as it was shaped by the anxieties of a nation mired in the Great Depression, sending its sons and husbands off to a far-flung war. Bogart became the model of the man circumstances demanded, a reluctant everyday hero who finally rises to the occasion when pushed too far. The age-old debate about nature versus nurture overlooks the role of culture, and Bogart, both on and off the screen, is testimony to the fact that we become who we are in response to the times in which we live, that the times favor some traits, some people - and some actors - over others. Bogart's appeal was and remains completely adult - so adult that it's hard to believe he was ever young. If men who take responsibility are hard to come by in films these days, it's because they're hard to come by, period, in an era when being a kid for life is the ultimate achievement, and "adult" as it pertains to film is just a euphemism for pornography. In an era when people drank a lot, Bogart drank more. 'The whole world is about three drinks behind,' he said. Holly Brubach writes frequently for The Times.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 6, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

Humphrey Bogart was 42 before in 1941 he broke through as an A-list star in The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra. He was dead of lung cancer a mere 16 years later. Yet, as Kanfer points out in his revealing account of Bogart's life and legacy, Bogie, in those few short years, established a cinematic identity that lives on across generations. Kanfer thoroughly covers the relatively familiar ground of Bogart's upbringing as the rebellious child of blue-blood parents; his long apprenticeships, first in the theater and then playing bad guys in the movies; and, finally, his brief but iconic years of stardom. Beyond that, though, what separates Kanfer's book from other Bogart bios by David Thomson, Jeffrey Meyers, and Richard Schickel is the emphasis on the actor's afterlife, the way that somehow his persona integrity, stoicism, sexual charisma accompanied by a cool indifference to women has never gone out of style. Bogart divided the world into professionals and bums, and Kanfer makes a convincing case that, with so many bums surrounding us today, the real pros never grow stale.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Kanfer, a Time magazine editor who has written biographies of Marlon Brando, Lucille Ball, and Groucho Marx, turns his attention to Humphrey Bogart, whose "outstanding characteristics-integrity, stoicism, a sexual charisma accompanied by a cool indifference to women-are never out of style when he's on-screen." After a privileged New York childhood as the son of famed illustrator Maud Humphrey, Bogart flunked out of Phillips Andover, joined the Navy near the end of WWI, and entered show business as a stage manager. Kanfer delivers compelling coverage of Bogart's early marriages and 13 years as a New York stage actor, culminating with The Petrified Forest, his 1935 Broadway breakthrough. Casablanca and other film classics are detailed with both illuminating insights and anecdotal accounts of Tinseltown. Raymond Chandler was pleased by the casting of The Big Sleep because, he wrote, "Bogart can be tough without a gun." By the mid-1940s, Bogart was the world's highest paid actor, with a resume of 19 plays and 53 films. Although Bogart was heard on more than 80 radio broadcasts (even singing) between 1936 and 1954, Kanfer overlooks this medium. Apart from that lapse, the biography stands as an entertaining, definitive portrait, enriched with delightful digressions into Bogie's noirish, rough-hewn persona. (Feb. 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Few stars of Hollywood's golden era have endured as long as Humphrey Bogart. Beginning in 1930, his film career spanned more than 25 years, the first ten of which were spent in generally unworthy potboilers. Comparatively few of his films were really memorable, and, physically, he was unprepossessing; however, he seems to speak anew to each successive generation and remains an iconic film figure. Many books have been written about him, but almost none has captured the man and the source of his magic as well as this latest from Kanfer (Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando). VERDICT In this possibly definitive Bogart biography, Kanfer convincingly presents the reasons for the actor's continuing relevance. He has uncovered relatively few new facts, but his eminently readable style makes the long-known details seem fresh again. This sprightly biography will appeal to film buffs and a large segment of the general reading public as well. [Four-city tour; see Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10.]-Roy Liebman, formerly with California State Univ., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

FormerTime contributor Kanfer (Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, 2008, etc.) tackles the screen legend, last deeply examined in competing 1997 biographies by Jeffrey Meyers, and A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax.The contours of the Humphrey Bogart (18991957) story are already familiar. Son of a wealthy New York surgeon, he was a prep-school failure and Navy vet who drifted into acting through the good graces of a friend's father, Broadway producer William Brady. After years as a male ingnue, he broke through as gunman Duke Mantee in the 1935 theatrical production of Robert Sherwood'sThe Petrified Forest. He flopped in Hollywood as a Fox contract player, but was signed by Warner Bros. after a sensational re-creation of his stage role. Following years playing ill-fated heavies on the Warner lot, Bogart finally made his mark in middle age as a tender-hearted hood in High Sierra (1941). Star-making, image-setting turns as detective Sam Spade inThe Maltese Falcon(1941) and nightclub owner Rick Blaine inCasablanca (1942) followed. The boozing, brawling, chain-smoking Bogie, veteran of three bad marriages, settled down with his teenagedco-star Lauren Bacall, survived a 1947 face-off with congressional Red hunters that threatened his career and collected an Oscar forThe African Queen(1951). Already an icon, he died of cancer at 57 and secured a posthumous cult in the '60s. Though Kanfer draws on past interviews with intimates to tell his story, he admits that he was hamstrung by the fact that few eyewitnesses survive. His slim volume, which leans heavily on plot synopses in the late going, is filled with make-weight quotes from memoirs and biographies. The author provides enough padding to stuff a comfortable sofa (enough with the Raymond Chandler quotations), brings little fresh perspective about Bogie's creation of the sensitive screen tough guy and offers facile observations about the disappearance of adult archetypes in today's youth-oriented movies.It's time for another top-drawer Bogart book. Maybe next time.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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chapter 1 The End Depends on the Beginning i In the 150-year history of cinema, few performers have arrived with a more impressive résumé of monetary privilege and social distinction. Humphrey Bogart's father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a high-toned graduate of Phillips Andover prep school and Columbia University; his medical degree came from Yale. Belmont rarely failed to inform classmates and colleagues that the Bogarts of Holland were among the earliest settlers in New York, and that one of their ancestors was the first "European" child to be born in that state. Actually, the Bogarts had been a line of burghers and truck farmers until Belmont's father, Adam, came along. He married late, became an innkeeper to support his wife and child, and compulsively tinkered in his off-hours. Lithography-etching on large, unwieldy stones-had become popular in the later nineteenth century; Adam seized the day, creating a process for transfering lithographs to portable sheets of tin. Printers wanted in on this new invention, and the sales made him a rich man. It was a classic case of an old family with new money, very much in the spirit of the nineteenth century. Adam relocated to Manhattan, taking comfort in the knowledge that many a New York City plutocrat had humble beginnings: Jacob Astor started out as a fur trapper; Peter Schermerhorn as a ship chandler; Frederick and William Rhinelander as bakers; Peter Lorillard as a tobacco merchant. Adam maneuvered the family name into the Blue Book of New York City society and, after his wife died, concentrated all his energy and ambition on his only son. There would be no hayseed in this boy's hair; no scent of the carbolic acid used to clean hotel rooms would cling to his clothes as it had to his father's. Adam was sharply aware of Power of Personality, a book by the business writer Orison Swett Marden. "In this fiercely competitive age," warned the author, "when the law of the survival of the fittest acts with seemingly merciless rigor, no one can afford to be indifferent to the smallest detail of dress, or manner, or appearance, that will add to his chance of success." Adam's son was caparisoned in the right wardrobe, sent to the best private schools, given a generous allowance. Pushed and prodded to get on in this ruthless new world, Belmont aimed high. Early on, he made up his mind to major in science and biology, get admitted to Yale Medical School, and then forge his own reputation as a physician. By his early thirties Dr. Bogart had realized his goals, serving on the staffs of three prominent Manhattan hospitals: Bellevue, St. Luke's, and Sloan. During that time, however, an accident wholly altered his life. He was riding in a horse-drawn ambulance when the animal got spooked in traffic, reared, and overturned the vehicle. Belmont's leg was broken, badly set, and then reset to correct the original errors. Morphine and other drugs were prescribed to lessen the misery. He leaned on them to get through the nights. Still, he was tall, slim, and attractive; sporting a cane, he continued to make his professional rounds and attend parties, customarily introduced as one of the city's most eligible bachelors. It was at one of those preaccident fêtes that the thirty-year-old medical man had met the twenty-nine-year-old daughter of a Rochester, New York, stove salesman. Maud Humphrey was almost Belmont's height, not quite beautiful, but striking, with russet hair, a determined jaw, and a slender, shapely figure. She was also famous. At the age of sixteen the art prodigy had sold drawings to magazines. After studying in Paris and New York she caught on as an illustrator of calendars, children's books, and advertisements for Ivory soap and Metropolitan Life Insurance. Everywhere Belmont looked, he saw her pictures. In their intelligent study, Maud Humphrey: Her Permanent Imprint on American Illustration, Karen Choppa and Paul Humphrey suggest that, skilled as she was, Maud owed much of her early success to industrial timing. Just as Enrico Caruso came along when single-sided wax recordings were being mass-produced, so Maud's meticulous watercolor technique turned out to be ideal for the brand-new methods of lithographic reproduction. Her renderings of moppets and misses were sentimental without being cloying, and expertly done; they made her the best-known illustrator of her time. When she and Belmont Bogart first met, he was drawing a yearly salary of twenty thousand dollars, an excellent sum in those days. Maud Humphrey was already earning more than twice as much. A liaison began, interrupted by Maud's militant feminism: Belmont's nineteenth-century, male-centered view made the suffragist uncomfortable. They broke off. Two years later she heard about his accident and dropped by to express her sympathy. She paid another call, and another, and another. During one rendezvous the pair abruptly decided that personal politics be damned, they could not live without each other. A week later an item appeared in the Ontario County Times of June 15, 1898. It explained that in view of Dr. Bogart's indisposition, Miss Humphrey thought she would rather nurse her husband through his trial than visit him duly chaperoned at stated intervals, so about the middle of the week the young couple announced casually that they were going to be married Saturday, and they were, with only a handful of cousins to give away the orphaned artist. The honeymoon will be spent in a hospital. Mrs. Bogart, nee Humphrey, is a connection of Admiral Dewey, and is also related to the Churchills and the Van Rensselaers. The newlyweds bought a four-story town house at 245 West 103rd Street, between Riverside Drive and West End Avenue, then a toney address. Down the hill was Riverside Park, leading to the mile-wide Hudson River and the picturesque craggy Palisades; across the street was the Hotel Marseille, city home of folks like Sara Roosevelt, mother of the future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Bogarts had four live-in help (two maids, a cook, and a laundress); their combined salaries added up to less than twenty dollars a week. In 1899, Maud gave birth to the Bogarts' first child and only son. He had something of his father's dark coloring, modified by his mother's delicate bone structure. The boy was christened with her maiden name, and there was great rejoicing. Before Humphrey was out of swaddling clothes Belmont made plans to enter him at Phillips Andover, predicting that someday young Bogart would become a doctor, like his old man. Over the next five years two daughters were added to the family. In keeping with Maud's progressive outlook, all three children were instructed to address her by her first name. None of them ever called her "Mother." She was not a great believer in hugs, either. A pat on the back or a soft clip on the shoulder was her way of showing affection. Belmont was undemonstrative as well, but this was in keeping with a man of his class and period. Thus he had enormous expectations of his handsome son; thus he assumed that Frances and Catherine would simply marry well and raise their own families. Maud demurred. They could have lives and jobs of their own; a new day was dawning for women. It was the beginning of many arguments about the family, and about life itself. For more than a decade the three little Bogarts enjoyed an atmosphere of ostentatious comfort, surrounded by reproductions of classical statues, heavy tapestries, and overstuffed horsehair couches and chairs. They played with the latest toys, were luxuriously togged, and ate the best food money could buy. When Maud and Belmont dined out, it was at stylish restaurants like Delmonico's and the Lafayette, but those occasions were rare; they were around the house much of the time. The doctor received patients in a mahogany-lined office on the first floor, and the artist did her work in a studio at the top of the house. On many occasions she sketched and painted until after midnight, when the only sound was the cooing of pigeons on the roof. Belmont raised them in his spare time; it was one of his many hobbies. His favorite avocation was sailing, something he had done as a youth. To that end, the Bogarts acquired an estate on the exclusive shore of Canandaigua Lake, one of the long, wide Finger Lakes in upstate New York. Willow Brook's fifty-five acres contained a working farm, an icehouse, and broad lawns leading down to the dock where Belmont kept a yacht he called the Comrade. So far, so Edwardian. Yet there were cracks in this grand façade, imperceptible to most outsiders but sadly apparent to Humphrey, Frances, and Catherine. For Maud and Belmont were running out of mutual affection. It was not a question of lovers or mistresses. They had gradually, and then not so gradually, grown apart, vanishing into their professional obligations and political beliefs, into alcohol, and, in Belmont's case, into morphine addiction. They fought much of the time, usually behind closed doors. But in hot weather secrets could not be kept so easily. Maud suffered from migraine headaches, and through the open windows her throaty voice could be overheard by neighbors, bawling out the children for some trivial misbehavior. Her outbursts were often followed by Belmont's own tantrums. Those could lead to harsh corporal punishment; like his father before him, Belmont was a believer in the razor strop as an instrument of moral instruction. At Willow Brook the children's lives veered between the terror of evening quarrels and the delights of lyrical summer afternoons. For Humphrey, some of the pleasure came from his newfound role as leader of the Seneca Point Gang. This was a self-styled group of adolescent boys who addressed him as "Hump," a nickname he found congenial. They skinny-dipped in local streams, built their own clubhouse of spare planks, played war with lead soldiers, and put on amateurish stage plays at the lakefront beach. There was nothing remarkable about these productions except for the costumes. They were the real thing, Broadway discards donated by William Aloysius Brady, a patient of Dr. Bogart's. Despite his Irish-sounding name, Bill Brady was a Jewish theatrical producer. At a time when New York society referred to Jews by such code references as NOKD (Not Our Kind, Darling) and restrictive covenants barred "Hebrews" from certain city neighborhoods, the Bogarts displayed few of the standard social biases. Maud was uncomfortable with Jews, but she considered herself a freethinker and a realist. One had to get along with all sorts of people these days. Belmont liked the idea of befriending a man who had managed two undisputed heavyweight champions, James Corbett and James Jeffries, bankrolled touring companies, married the glamorous actress Grace George, and owned the Playhouse Theater on 48th Street. Brady's son, Bill Jr., was an occasional houseguest and honorary gang member; more often he and Humphrey formed their own mini-gang back in the city, where they checked out Sarah Bernhardt and W. C. Fields at the Palace, broke up at the antics of Chaplin and Keaton, and gazed approvingly at the manly images of John Barrymore and Francis X. Bushman in nickelodeons. Bill Sr. had little use for movies-he told the boys they were a passing fad, full of exaggerated gestures by overemoting hambones. He was fond of quoting the director Marshall Neilan: "The sooner the stage people who have come into pictures get out, the better for the pictures." Excerpted from Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart by Stefan Kanfer All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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