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Review

Until Darwin Porter's newest biography, very little was known about the early life of Hollywood’s most famous movie star. Compiled after extensive interviews with eyewitnesses, some of them conducted as early as the 1930s, it delves deep into the star’s hot and horny formative years on Broadway and in pre-Talkie Hollywood, when publicists from the movie studios twisted and suppressed inconvenient details about the lives of its emerging stars.

One can’t read a book like this without a sense of irony at the creation of Hollywood myths, and a sense of admiration for the biographers who unlock the windows. Illusions about the chain-smoking anti-hero with the trenchcoat might suffer in the process, but one emerges with a new understanding of who Bogart, the man, really was. A reader gets a sense of the daunting odds Bogart faced during his struggle for survival in early Hollywood. The biography also conveys enough saucy anecdotes to keep a barroom of Hollywood fans intrigued. And it teaches a hell of a lot about the back-room tawdriness, blackmail, extortion, larceny, bartered sex, and sheer unadulterated pain inflicted on its players by America’s most distinctive industry.

Humphrey Bogart was born in 1899 into the prosperous but dysfunctional union of a New York City doctor and a successful commercial artist and Suffragette, both of whom hobnobbed with the likes of Theodore Dreiser and a young Franklin D. Roosevelt, and both of whom struggled with addictions to morphine. Never particularly gifted either at sports or at academics (he was eventually expelled from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussetts) Bogart became fascinated with Jazz Age Broadway, making friends with entertainment-industry impresarios when he was still a teenager. He showed an early propensity for developing crushes on actresses (some of whom reciprocated his attentions). They included everyday vaudevillians as well as luminaries of the pre-World War I Theater, among them Sarah Bernhardt, Alice Brady, and Grace George, all of them huge names in their day.

Precocious and an avid reader, Bogart reached his sexual adulthood in prep school with older women, then expanded his sexual horizons to include dalliances with Hollywood players who often became a legends in their own right. Well-documented notches on his bedpost were devoted, respectively, to Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Bebe Daniels, Glenda Farrell (who he met during her tenure as one of the working girls in a prominent brothel), and—longest running of all—Joan Blondell. In between, at least as covered within the pages of this biography, Bogart managed to marry twice, in both cases, with talented and beautiful actresses, one of whom happened to be a lesbian. And in predictable tough-guy style, most important rites of passage (and most of the minor ones as well) were liberally drenched in bathtubs of illicit Prohition-era booze.

Contrary to a myth that was deliberately cultivated by publicists at Fox, Bogart did not exhibit any particular heroism in the armed services. His military record, which lasted only a few months, was lackluster, riddled with episodes of being AWOL during crucial moments. If not for the intervention of FDR, who owed the Bogart family a favor after they helped rescue him from drowning in Lake Canandaigua during one of their summer holidays, Bogart might have spent years of his young life in the brig.

No one’s fame in Hollywood comes without paying a price. Darwin Porter examines the price Bogart paid for compulsive brushes with gangsters, prostitutes, and blackmailers, details of which were aggressively suppressed as his career blossomed, then collapsed, then blossomed again during the 1920s and 30s. Bogart was for a time coerced into a thankless role as errand boy and courier for Howard Hughes, after Bogart’s botched seduction of Hughes’ mistress, Billie Dove. In addition to pimping for male escorts for Howard Hughes, one of Bogart’s tasks involved escorting Jean Harlow from Los Angeles to a clinic in Tijuana for an abortion of a child believed to have been fathered by Hughes himself. Bogart became deeply involved in these and in other indiscretions which, if they’d been publicized by Louella Parsons (whom Bogart cajoled and coerced with a one-night sexual affair) would have destroyed his Hollywood career.

Regrettably, this biography covers only the early years (1899 to 1931) of Bogart’s life, leaving the actor’s middle-aged and final years—the Casablanca, African Queen, John Huston, and Lauren Bacall involvements—completely untouched.

Bogart eventually died of throat cancer in 1957, never wanting to discuss the details of his early days in Hollywood. But since Darwin Porter brings a treasure trove of insight to Bogart’s until-now-largely unexamined early years, we can only wait, breathlessly, for a sequel.