Bogart (24 page)

Once when I was a kid my father brought six young actors over to the house to talk about acting. Frank Sinatra was there, too. All of the young actors were unknown at the time, but two of them made the cut, so to speak. One of them was
Tom Laughlin, who later starred in the
Billy Jack
films. An
other was Dennis Hopper.

Bogie sat on the floor, and the young actors, sitting
cross-legged on the floor, gathered around him. “Keep working. Never be ‘available,’” he told them. This was advice he
had been given long ago, and he quoted it often. “Keep play
ing in theater or TV, anywhere, as often as you can. Eventu
ally, if you’re any good, somebody will see you. Of course
the best way to get into the picture business is to go on the
stage first.”

“Why do you keep working, now that you’re such a big
star?” one of the young actresses asked.

“I don’t know,” Bogie said. “I have a charming wife, two
beautiful kids, a gorgeous home, and a yacht. But I’ll be
damned if I know why I work so hard. Sinatra and I were talk
ing about it the other day. Working is therapy, I guess. It
keeps us on the wagon. This is a very bad town to be out of
work in. After a week or so of not working you’re so bored
you don’t know what the hell to do.”

Bogart also told the young people, “If you want to be an
actor be honest with yourself. Don’t let them push you
around. When you believe in something, you fight for it even
though you may suffer for it. We actors are better judges than
any studio as to what is good for us. As soon as your name
gets known and you feel you can say, ‘I won’t do this,’ if you
think the part isn’t right, go ahead, say it. In the long run it
will pay off. Just remember to put some dough aside for the
times you’re suspended.”

Dad asked Dennis Hopper why he wanted to be an actor.

“It’s a lot of things,” Hopper said. “To do something in
life, to be somebody.”

“But why acting?” my father asked. “Why not farming?
Or something else?”

“I’m just best suited for acting,” Hopper said. “I want, I
don’t know, I just have the urge to be better than—”

“Yes, all right, go on,” my father said.

“To be better than the other guy,” Hopper said.

“To get out of the millions?”

“Yes,” Hopper said, “that’s it.”

My father smiled. “You’re okay, kid,” he said. He said
“kid” a lot.

“Enjoy the applause,” he told the actors. “It’s wonderful.
It has nothing to do with vanity. It’s the satisfaction, like tell
ing a joke and having everybody laugh.”

And he told them, “Don’t go to parties to meet people.”

On the subject of publicity he said, “A star has to accept
a certain invasion of privacy. If you get loaded in a bar, then
you can’t get mad if it’s printed.”

“What do you think a star is?” one of the women asked.

“Good stories make stars,” Bogie said. “But if you want to be an actress, don’t say, ‘I want to be a star.’ Just concentrate on acting, learn your trade. You’ve got to develop con
fidence if you’re to play a scene right, and confidence comes
from knowing the ropes. Personally, I think you’re all in a
hell of a mess, wanting to be actors, because they don’t know
what acting is in Hollywood. They think it’s easy to act. They
think actors are a necessary evil.”

My father had some very definite ideas about acting and
actors. He was skeptical about actors with a message. “If an
actor has got a message he should call Western Union,” Bogie said. “An actor’s job is to act, nothing more. He owes the
public nothing but a good performance.”

Sam Jaffe told me, “Your father was not impressed with
method actors. I remember being on the set with Bogart in
one film and he was working with a young, so-called method actor. Bogie said to me, ‘Sam, watch this guy. He thinks he’s
going to steal the scene from me.’ So they started a new take
and the other actor made a lot of noise and moved his body
and his hands a lot. But when the rushes were shown it was
Bogart who caught the eye. There was no way you could steal
a scene from Bogie. He said he had two rules for playing with
method actors. One was to let them improvise as much as
they wanted, and the other was never to play an eating scene
with them because they spit all over you.”

My father once asked a young actor about the
Stanislavski method.

“Well, Stanislavski claimed that the real interpretation
comes from the subconscious,” the young actor explained.
“We can’t touch it or control it, but if we release it, it will
flow from the subconscious.”

Bogie probably thought this was so much horse manure,
but he replied politely. “If you’ll pardon the expression,” he
said, “you’ve got me completely screwed up. But I know this, the audience is always a little ahead of you. If a guy points a
gun at you the audience knows you’re afraid. You don’t have
to make faces. You just have to believe you are the person.”

Bogie said that the key to good acting was concentration.
You might recall that first shot of Rick in
Casablanca
shows him playing chess alone. This was my father’s idea, because
playing chess alone was something he did often, and he asso
ciated it with his acting. He believed that his concentration at
chess was what he needed in his acting.

While Bogie believed in talent and concentration, I sus
pect he would agree with Woody Allen, who once said that
eighty percent of life is just showing up. Bogie was a guy who
always showed up for work.

“Bogie was a man who was very disciplined,” Sam Jaffe
says. “People come to me and they often bring up the fact
that he drank while he worked in a picture, and I say, you got
the wrong man. Bogie came to work with a lunch pail. In it
he had one bottle of cold beer. At lunch time he would go to
his bungalow or his trailer and he would eat his lunch and
have his beer. And he timed it. One half hour. Then he
would lie down and go right to sleep for the other half hour.
Bogie was anything but a drinker when he worked in pic
tures. He was completely sober because he was a man who
came out of the theater and his acting and his art was something he revered and respected. He came to work like any
disciplined worker and he knew his lines. He really liked
what he was doing. But people used to say he was a drunk
ard. It’s true he got in fights and drank when he was not
working, but not on the set.”

This is something that everybody says about my father.
He was never late, always knew his lines, and would rehearse
for as long as necessary for the other actors so that they
didn’t have to talk to a wall. In fact, one beef my father had
with Sinatra, even though they were close friends, was that he
felt Frank was not a professional as an actor, though he cer
tainly was as a singer. Bogie felt that Sinatra treated acting
too lightly. During the later years of his life, Bogie would be
in bed by ten o’clock when he had to work the next day, and
he often chided Sinatra for being such a carouser during the
making of a film.

Actually, there is one recorded time of my father letting
booze interfere with his work at Warner Brothers. He got
drunk one night and the next morning refused to work. In
stead, he zoomed around the Warner Brothers lot on his
bicycle, shouting, “Look, no hands, no hands,” like a ten-
year-old who had learned a new trick.

Finally, Jack Warner came out to talk to him.

“Bogie, what the hell are you doing?”

“Riding my bicycle,” Bogie said.

“It’s time to go to work,” Warner said.

“I don’t feel like working.”

“You don’t, huh?”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Well,” Warner said, “there’s a lot of people in there
who do feel like working and they get paychecks that are less
than what you spend on scotch.”

“So,” Bogie said. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that these people are depending on you. If
you don’t work, they don’t work.”

That pretty much ended that conversation. Bogie put
his bike away and went to work, and never showed up
drunk again.

Though Bogie was disciplined about acting, he claimed
not to be sentimental about it.

“I take my work seriously,” he said, “but none of this art
for art’s sake. Any art or any job of work that’s any good at
all sells. If it’s worth selling, it’s worth buying. I have no sentimentality about such matters. If someone offers me five dol
lars a year more than I’m getting I take it.”

Sounds nice, but it simply is not true. Bogie also said,
“The only reason to make a million dollars is so you can tell
some fat producer to go to hell.” And the fact is that Bogie,
who was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood in the late
1940s, often gave up a great deal of money in order to play
the roles he really wanted.

“Your father was an intellectual, for an actor,” Phil Gersh
says. “Generally, actors aren’t very smart. But he was very well
read. One time he came to my office and he said, ‘Phillip,
have you read this book,
The Caine Mutiny
?

“I said yes.

“‘And do you know Stanley Kramer?’ he said. Stanley
was going to direct
The Caine Mutiny.

“I said, ‘Yes, I know Stanley very well.’

“And your father said, ‘Well, I’d like to play Captain
Queeg.’

“So I called Stanley and he said he thought Bogie would
be great as Queeg, and I called Harry Cohn, who was head
of Columbia. Now, at that time the top salary for a big star
was about $200,000 per picture. So I told Cohn that’s what
we’re looking for and Cohn says, ‘No, no, he wants to play
this part, we’ll pay him $75,000.’ And Bogie ended up doing
the movie for a lot less money than he could have gotten for
another film. Every studio in town knew they could get
Bogart for cheap if he really wanted a part.”

Bogie must have had good instincts about Queeg, be
cause the role earned him his fourth Oscar nomination.
Marlon Brando beat him out that year, for
On the Waterfront.

But Bogie’s instincts were not always so good about
films. He made some bad ones, and he knew it. When he was
in Italy with Huston making
Beat the Devil,
for example, he
sensed that the film was in trouble. He thought the first
script was a dog and that maybe he and Huston should drop
the whole thing. Instead, Huston brought Truman Capote
over to rewrite. Capote turned what had been a complicated
adventure into a parody, but not all of the actors knew that. The result was a dopey, oddball movie that was supposed to
be a spoof of caper movies, but just did not meet with every
body’s taste. When the movie came out it was a financial fail
ure. In fact, one theater placed an ad apologizing for
showing the film, but, noting that they were obliged to run it
a few more days, offered to give the admission price back to anybody who thought it was as lousy as they, apparently, did.

Critically, the film was given good marks and bad. One
reviewer said that no matter where you came in during the
movie you felt as if you had missed half of it. Dad, it seems, agreed that
Beat the Devil
was a disaster, and he said that the
people who thought it was funny were phony intellectuals.

Beat the Devil
would later have a cult following, but that
doesn’t make it a good film. Many Bogie films have cult followings and many of them are bad.
The Big Sleep,
for exam
ple, has many devoted fans, and the movie is great fun, but
is also a confused mess. Bosley Crowther says, “So many cryp
tic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting
that the mind becomes utterly confused.” And when my fa
ther was asked what happened to the chauffeur in the movie,
he replied, “I’m damned if I know.”