City of Nets Read online

  Jack Warner grudgingly approved the idea of a second remake if Huston could produce a satisfactory script. “You and I—we’ll do the screenplay,” Huston said to Rivkin, who shared his office and his secretary at Warners. “But first, before we do that—let’s get it broken down. You know, have the secretary recopy the book, only setting it up in shots, scenes, and dialogue. Then we’ll know where we are. Okay, kid?” So the anonymous secretary dutifully converted Hammett’s novel, without substantial change, into a preliminary script for Huston. As a matter of company procedure (or perhaps secretarial ambition?), this preliminary version went not only to departmental headquarters but to Jack Warner himself. Warner was delighted. “You’ve got my okay, Johnny,” he told Huston. “It’s a great script.” “Goddamnedest thing happened, kid,” Huston reported to Rivkin. “Warner said he wants me to shoot it, and I start next Monday.”

  The next accident involved the casting of Warner’s biggest gangster star, George Raft, as Sam Spade. Raft had grown up in the slums of New York’s Ninth Avenue, and he remained a lifelong friend of various Hell’s Kitchen gangsters, so much so that these professional gunmen imitated the styles that Raft created for them. The white tie on black shirt was a Raft trademark, as was the nonchalant flipping of a coin (actually suggested by Howard Hawks when he hired Raft to co-star in Scarface). Al Capone himself asked Raft why he kept flipping the coin, and Raft casually said, “Just a little theatrical touch.” But for all his seeming authority, Raft not only had no talent as an actor but had no sense of his own public identity. He refused to play the gangster in Sidney Kingsley’s Dead End (1937) unless he was allowed to warn the Dead End kids that crime did not pay. So the part went to a young actor named Humphrey Bogart. Raft also refused to play the fugitive hero in Huston’s latest script, High Sierra (1941), because the fugitive got shot at the end, and Raft didn’t want to play men who got shot. He had other objections as well. “Too many words, Irving,” he said to an intermediary. “Too many words.”

  Warners turned to some of its other eminent gangsters. Paul Muni, who had been Raft’s boss in Scarface, rejected the role because Raft had rejected it; so did Edward G. Robinson; so did John Garfield. Bogart said only, “Where the hell’s the script and when do I start?” It was his first starring role.

  Now Raft didn’t want to play Sam Spade either. He said that The Maltese Falcon was “not an important picture.” His chief reason seems to have been that Huston was a novice director, but his agent, Myron Selznick, was also skeptical, and Raft’s contract said he didn’t have to perform in any remakes. “I didn’t know much so I listened to guys who were supposed to know something,” Raft later explained. “It was a low-budget picture.” Jack Warner broke the news to Huston: “Guess you’ll have to settle for Bogie.” There were other complications of the same sort. Huston wanted Geraldine Fitzgerald to play Brigid O’Shaughnessy, but Warners insisted on Mary Astor.

  Sydney Greenstreet as Gutman was one of Huston’s inspirations. At a waddling 285 pounds and sixty-one years of age, Greenstreet had never made a movie, but Huston had seen him playing butlers on Broadway and insisted on signing him up. Peter Lorre, a witty and cultivated refugee from Berlin, had become an exemplar of loathsome perversions when Fritz Lang cast him as the compulsive child-murderer in M, so he brought a cringing malevolence to the role of Joel Cairo. And for good luck, Walter Huston, the young director’s famous father, agreed to play the bit part of the dying ship captain who staggered into Spade’s office with the crudely wrapped package containing the legendary falcon. It was, in short, a spectacularly talented cast. And then there was Huston himself. “As a rule,” he recalled later, “at the end of the day everyone goes home, each to his separate domicile. But we were all having such a good time on Falcon that, night after night after shooting, Bogie, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor and I would go over to the Lakeside Country Club. We’d have a few drinks, then a buffet supper, and stay on till midnight. We all thought we were doing something good, but no one had any idea that The Maltese Falcon would be a great success.”

  Much of that success can be credited, if only by default, to Huston himself. Just as he relied heavily on Hammett’s original novel for his screenplay, he relied heavily on Arthur Edeson’s quasi-documentary photography for the bleak, dark, claustrophobic quality that came to be known as film noir. Some experts ascribe the flowering of film noir during the early 1940’s to some of the German refugees—Lang, Wilder, Preminger, Siodmak—who brought with them memories of the style that had been developed at the UFA studios in Berlin. Others suggest that it was simply a matter of economics. At Warners, a studio so frugal that some of its employees called it “San Quentin,” shooting a film in moody darkness and rain tended to disguise the cheapness of the sets. These elements all suited the young Huston on his first assignment, for, as Charles Higham has written, “the film’s most striking feature is its insolent casualness, its deliberate lack of flourish.”

  Huston also had the wit to sense in Bogart an actor on the verge of triumph and to focus on him in scene after scene. For if the script was a faithful translation of Hammett’s novel, it was Bogart who made the movie not only different from the novel but substantially better. When we imagine Spade, a half century after Hammett created him, we don’t see anything like the figure that Hammett described: “Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. . . . His yellow-gray eyes were horizontal . . . He looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan.” Nor do we hear the voice that might have come from such a “Satan.” We see, hear, recognize, and know the somewhat wrinkled and battered figure of Humphrey Bogart. The Maltese Falcon was the movie in which he created the persona that not only made him famous for the rest of his life but gradually became his own permanent identity.

  Bogart had not been born for any such fate. His father, Dr. Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a prosperous physician in New York; his mother, Maude Humphrey, was a suffragette, a magazine illustrator who prided herself on having studied in Paris with Whistler. Humphrey, their firstborn, arrived on Christmas Day of 1899. (“I never had a birthday of my own to celebrate,” he later complained.) There were two younger sisters, one who suffered a mental breakdown and another who died of peritonitis. Young Humphrey went to Trinity, a starchy Episcopalian school on New York’s Upper West Side, then to Andover, which was supposed to prepare him for Yale and a life of upper-middle-class respectability. He flunked five of seven subjects, however, flunked Bible, French, English, chemistry, and geometry. The headmaster wrote sternly to Dr. Bogart that he was “forced to advise you . . . that it becomes necessary for us to require his withdrawal from the school.”

  Dr. Bogart was shocked. It was 1918, though, so Humphrey enlisted in the navy, served a few months on a troop transport, then emerged into a New York where, for a handsome young man, nothing was very serious and anything was possible. A school friend named Bill Brady had a father who dabbled in theatrical productions and agreed to hire Bogart as an office boy. Office boys traditionally became understudies, and understudies eventually won bit parts. The morning after Humphrey’s Broadway debut, his mother woke him up to read him Alexander Woollcott’s review: “The young man . . . was what might mercifully be described as inadequate.” Even then, though, he had admirers. “My first impression of Humphrey Bogart,” Louise Brooks wrote of meeting him in 1924, “was of a slim boy with charming manners, who was unusually quiet for an actor. His handsome face was made extraordinary by a most beautiful mouth. It was very full, rosy, and perfectly modeled. . . .”

  Such views enabled Bogart to keep finding roles throughout the 1920’s. It has been reported, but never proved, that he appeared on stage in a blue blazer and actually said, “Tennis, anyone?” He was beginning, though, to acquire a label as an aging juvenile. Then he got a chance to audition for a wildly unlikely role, the fugitive gangster in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest. Leslie Howard, who was not only the star but the coproducer, quickly decide
d that Bogart would be perfect as the psychopathic Duke Mantee, and when the play opened in 1935, the theater critics warmly endorsed Howard’s judgment. Warners bought the play, hired Howard to star in it, took an option on Bogart, and then assigned the part of Duke Mantee to Edward G. Robinson. Bogart unhappily telegraphed this news to Howard in Scotland. Howard telegraphed Warners that he would not play the hero unless Bogart played the gangster. Warners gave in and summoned the young man to Hollywood.

  On late-night television, Bogart’s famous performance as the swaggering Duke Mantee seems almost preposterous. His two-day growth of stubble is supposed to make him look sinister but succeeds largely in making him look disreputable. His voice is supposed to be a guttural snarl but it fluctuates between an affected drawl and bombastic shouting. In short, Bogart looks and sounds like a nice young man trying very hard to appear tough and terrifying. In its day, the pretense was a great success. Richard Watts of the New York Herald Tribune was reasonably typical in declaring that Bogart “provides a brilliant picture of a subnormal, bewildered and sentimental killer.” Perhaps American audiences of the mid-1930’s, when more than one third of the work force could not find jobs of any sort, liked to imagine that they were frightened by imitations of gangsters.

  So Humphrey Bogart, who had failed in his destined course toward Yale, became a gangster. “Over the years,” Louise Brooks recalled, “Bogey practiced all kinds of lip gymnastics, accompanied by nasal tones, snarls, lisps and slurs.” He snarled and lisped through a whole string of superficial roles: San Quentin. Dead End. The Roaring Twenties. He got $650 a week, and toward the end of most movies, he got shot, snarling. American audiences were fascinated by the gangsters who had suddenly emerged from the dark slums into the sunshine of political power during Prohibition, but nobody was quite sure how gangsters really talked, or even what they looked like. The gangsters themselves, ignorant ghetto boys like Louis Buchalter or farmhands like Clyde Barrow, didn’t themselves know how they were supposed to behave. So Hollywood taught them. Just as George Raft, recollecting his boyhood as a dance hall gigolo, taught them how to dress, so Humphrey Bogart (and Jimmy Cagney too) taught them how to snarl. “His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures,” Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe remarked of a gunman in The Big Sleep. “Pictures have made them all like that.”

  The Hays Office, which Hollywood established as a system of self-censorship after various scandals of the 1920’s, insisted that movie gangsters must die before the pictures ended. Crime does not pay. Unlike George Raft, who didn’t want to be shot, the best of the gangster actors quickly realized that violent death had been the fate of Macbeth and Hamlet. Did Edward G. Robinson ever declaim a more famous line than his question in the snows of Little Caesar: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” But Bogart must have instinctively realized, as he was shot down over and over again during the late 1930’s, growling his defiant last words each time with that throaty gangster accent he had invented for himself, that he was going nowhere. Every role was just another job, every snarling death just another snarling death, until, in High Sierra, he saw his first chance at playing a fugitive convict who could become a romantic hero. Ida Lupino loved him, and when he inevitably died at the end, the audiences did not relish his death, as they traditionally relished the shootings of gangsters; they felt saddened. And when Bogart came to New York to churn up some publicity for the film, he was surprised—Warners was even more surprised—to find himself mobbed by his new fans.

  Bogart was having terrible troubles during these years with his third wife, Mayo Methot. She drank heavily, and as she drank, she first began accusing him of flirtation, vanity, and various other sins, and then she began smashing things. “I like a jealous wife . . .” Bogart told an interviewer. “And I like a good fight. So does Mayo. We have some first-rate battles.” Warring husbands and wives often give each other cues, and one of Mayo’s most ominous signals was the song, “Embraceable You.” She was singing it one night when Bogart returned home from a drying-out session at the Finlandia Baths on Sunset Boulevard, and that was her only warning before she lunged at him with a butcher knife. Bogart ducked and ran, but she stabbed him in the back. He fell to the floor and passed out, woke to hear someone calling for a doctor, passed out again, woke to hear a doctor say, “It’s not so bad. Only the tip went in. He’s a lucky man.”

  Bogart often spent all night drinking, then appeared at the studio fully ready to work. His portrayal of Sam Spade embodied all that. It was the portrait of a man who had been up all night, a man with both a hangover and a determination to get a day’s work done, a man whose wife had stabbed him in the back and might do so again. Yet Bogart’s Spade had another characteristic lacking in Hammett’s original creation, and that was humor. When Hammett’s Spade roughed up the young gunman, Wilmer, he was just being tough. When Bogart roughed up Elisha Cook, he was being not only tough but perilously funny, mocking and humiliating a man who yearned to kill him. It was a great scene.

  Humor combined with a kind of willed toughness made Bogart immensely sympathetic, and real in a way that his gangsters had never been. It was, of course, a reality based on layers of deception. “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” Spade told Brigid toward the end. So Humphrey Bogart of Andover, who had gained a temporary success playing gangsters, achieved his huge triumph and spent the rest of his life playing pseudo gangsters, enforcers of the higher law of their own creation.

  Up to the very end, the authorities at Warners couldn’t seem to understand that The Maltese Falcon was a marvelous title. Having changed it to “Dangerous Female” and “Men on Her Mind” and “Satan Met a Lady,” and having failed every time, they now wanted, even at the last preview, to change it to “The Gent from Frisco.” It was apparently Hal Wallis, the production chief, who persuaded all the nervous improvers to desist. So The Maltese Falcon, finally, was a smashing success.

  And what financial rewards did Dashiell Hammett, the creator, derive from this success? Nothing whatever, for when Warner Bros. had bought the movie rights to his novel eleven years earlier, for $8,500, the studio had bought all movie rights forevermore. A few years later, in fact, when Hammett sold ABC Radio the right to produce a series called The Adventures of Sam Spade, Warners filed suit claiming, in the spring of 1948, that the studio owned the name of Sam Spade as well as all related “scenes, language, story, dialogue, plot, characters, and other materials” of The Maltese Falcon. It took three years of judgments and appeals before Hammett won the right to his own hero, and by that time the whole show had been forced off the airwaves on the ground that Hammett was a “subversive.”

  Despite Hollywood’s three versions of its favorite legend about itself, its stars were not born but rather cultivated, like Candide’s garden. The studios put their employees in role after role and watched to see what happened. While a complex character like Bogart’s transformed itself into something rich and strange. Ronald Reagan seemed to remain perpetually the same, cheerful and friendly. Though Reagan had won considerable attention and praise in Knute Rockne, that was only the fourth of his six pictures in 1940. Warners promptly loaned him out to M-G-M for Tugboat Annie Sails Again, then put him to work with Errol Flynn in Santa Fe Trail. As 1941 started, he went back to M-G-M for The Bad Man, then returned to Warners for Million Dollar Baby. By now a successful journeyman and a member of the board of the Screen Actors Guild, he was earning one thousand dollars a week, a princely salary during the last years of the Depression for a modestly talented actor just turning thirty, but not very much by Hollywood standards. Claudette Colbert, Bing Crosby, and Irene Dunne each made more than eight times that much. Reagan was generally considered pleasant and hard-working, useful, not much more.

  The year 1941 was important to Reagan. It began, almost exactly a year after his marriage to Jane Wyman, with the birth of their first child, Maureen, on January 4. Three months later, Reagan’s alcoholic father, who had b
een such a troublesome hero, died of heart failure. The routine films rolled on: Nine Lives Are Not Enough (Reagan recalled his role as a brash reporter: “You could always count on me to rush into a room, grab a phone and yell, ‘Give me the city desk—I’ve got a story that will crack this town wide open’ ”);* International Squadron (Reagan as an American stunt pilot in Warners’ version of the RAF: “Our ‘Spitfire’ was a doctored-up Ryan monoplane that didn’t even have retractable gear”). But then came Kings Row, which Reagan recalled as a “slightly sordid but moving yarn,” which “made me a motion picture star.”

  Warners had spent fifty thousand dollars to buy this ponderous bestseller, without quite knowing what it was doing. The author, Henry Bellamann, a Vassar professor of music who had turned to writing novels in his fifties, was one of the many disciples of Balzac: Kings Row fell about halfway between Winesburg, Ohio and Peyton Place. Here, there, and everywhere, the disciples of Balzac were determined to demonstrate that the tranquil surface of small-town life covered a roiling inferno of fraud, corruption, treachery, hypocrisy, class warfare, and ill-suppressed sex of all varieties: adultery, sadism, homosexuality, incest. And philistinism, of the kind that could not appreciate Bellamann’s florid opening sentence: “Spring came late in the year 1890, so it came more violently, and the fullness of its burgeoning heightened the seasonal disturbance that made unquiet in the blood.”