Here’s Looking at Him

By Holly Brubach, New York Times Sunday Book Review, Published: February 6, 2011

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.”

Museum of the City of New York/Getty Images
Humphrey Bogart, around 1920.

TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN
The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart
By Stefan Kanfer
Illustrated. 288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

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, he 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.)
The full review at New York Times.