Bogart (21 page)

“I am not a Communist,” he said. “I detest communism
as any other decent American does. I have never in my life been identified with any Communistic front organization. I
went to Washington because I thought fellow Americans were
being deprived of their Constitutional rights and for that rea
son alone.

“I see now that my trip was ill-advised, foolish, and im
petuous, but at the time it seemed the thing to do. I acted
impetuously and foolishly on the spur of the moment, like I
am sure many other American citizens do at many times.”

He told Ed Sullivan, “I’m about as much in favor of communism as J. Edgar Hoover. I despise communism and I
believe in our American brand of democracy. Our planeload
of movie people who flew to Washington came east to fight
against censorship being clamped on the movies. The ten
men cited for contempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee are certainly not typical of Hollywood. On every occasion at Washington we stressed our opposition to Lawson
and his crew, so there could be no doubt as to where we
stood. In fact, before we left Hollywood we carefully screened
every performer so that no red or pink could infiltrate and
sabotage our purpose.”

My father’s reaction had many interpretations. Some
people felt that he was copping out, just trying to protect his career. Others say that he just didn’t want to be part of some
thing that he couldn’t control. My mother, always looking for
the best in Bogie, says that he realized that he was misled and
he was angry about it.

I’ve given this some thought. I’m not sure that my moth
er’s view makes sense. It seems to me that if Bogie and the
others went to Washington to defend a principle, not the ten accused, then that principle didn’t change just because some
of the ten really were Communists. If he went to defend con
stitutional rights, then how was he misled or ill-advised? I
happen to think that Bogie was wrong here, just as I have
been wrong about hundreds of things. Maybe he was just try
ing to save his career. Maybe he was a human being and was
expressing the simple human desire for self-preservation.
Dad, apparently, came to feel the same way about his change
of heart. Mother says, “He felt coerced into it, and he was
never proud of it.”

The ten were eventually convicted of contempt of Congress and sent to jail, some for as much as a year. One ironic
twist, which I found satisfying: Some of them were sent to the
federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and one of their fel
low inmates was none other than J. Parnell Thomas, the
great, self-righteous, Commie-hunter. Turns out he was a
scummy little crook who was bagged for padding a payroll
and taking kickbacks.

My father’s role in the Unfriendly Ten, of getting involved
politically and then dropping out, would not make for good
cinema. Much more effective is the reverse, which is what Bo
gie often played in films: the man who does not want to get
involved, wants to be left alone, but is eventually drawn in
and compelled to take a side because a principle is at stake. Remember Charlie Allnut in
The African Queen
?
When
Hepburn’s character suggests that they cruise on down the
river and blow up a German ship he tells her she is nuts and
he wants no part of it. Of course, he ends up designing his
own torpedo and going after the Germans with Hepburn.

Casablanca
is, of course, the classic example. Rick Blaine
was this tough American who ran a cafe in Morocco. Even
though he was flanked on every side by someone’s political
passion, he was the kind of guy who didn’t take sides. He was
cynical about all causes and he wanted to be left out of them.
He was not into patriotism or nationalism or any other ism.
But in the end he did the decent thing and he didn’t expect
to be praised for it. Rick was the guy that a lot of people want
to be.

Was my father like Rick Blaine? Yes, in many ways. I
don’t think Dad was big on isms, either. He had ideals, but
he was skeptical when other people talked about their ideals.
He was big on compassion and loyalty, but his eyes tended to
glaze over when other people went on too much about how
compassionate and loyal they were. Maybe Rick Blaine would
have handled the Unfriendly Ten controversy differently, but
hell, nobody can be like Rick Blaine all the time, not even
Humphrey Bogart.

Whether my father was a Rick Blaine or not, there is no question that
Casablanca
was the movie that gave the public
its most memorable political image of Humphrey Bogart.

Alistair Cooke told me, “Your father is a legend, and a
lot of it is tied up in that film,
Casablanca.
It was a stroke of
colossal luck, that film appearing at a time when Hitler had
demonstrated something we were loathe to admit: the suc
cess of violence.
Casablanca
first came to theaters just eigh
teen days after the Allied landing in Casablanca. This was one
of the first great blows against Hitler. Then later, when they
put the film in wider release, what was going on? Churchill,
Roosevelt, and Stalin were holding a summit conference.
And where were they holding it? Casablanca. Was it any won
der that the public got your father’s character all mixed up
with reality?”

Cooke is right when he says there was a lot of luck in
volved. But Warner Brothers gave luck a little help. The
movie was scheduled to be released later in 1943, but they
rushed it to theaters after the Allied invasion of Casablanca
in November of 1942.

Cooke, I found, was particularly interested not in Bogie’s politics, so much as the effect that world politics had on my
father’s career. He says, “The gangster film fell out of favor
when World War Two came along. How could you get excited
about gangsters shooting a few people, when Hitler was
doing things that Warner Brothers could never dream up?
And out of the top gangster stars, like Robinson, and Cagney, and Raft, it was your father who seemed best suited to go up
against Nazis in the movies.”

Cooke once wrote of Bogie, “He probably had no no
tion, in his endless strolls across the stages and drawing
rooms of the twenties, that he was being saved and soured by
time to become the romantic democratic answer to Hitler’s
new order.”

* * *

Like most people, my father was more likely to jump into a political issue that directly affected him. One of them was
censorship.

In the late 1940s, with Hitler vanquished, gangsters were
popular in films again and there was a lot of whining and
hand wringing about the rising number of crime movies. For
a short time crime movies were even banned by the Johnston
office, which was the Hollywood censorship office at the
time. The ban, like most censorship attempts, was effective
only for a brief time. Soon more crime movies were reaching
the screen and many people were upset.

Though my father had little patience with the complain
ers, he did concede a few points for their side. Discussing one recent prison movie he said, “It was a story of a bunch
of bad eggs who broke out of stir and finally were put back
where they belonged. I can see no reason for the picture.”
(This was a sentiment he had expressed before. Once, when
his friend Mark Hellinger called to see what Bogie thought of the prison movie
Brute Force,
Bogie replied, “Why did you
make it? A picture should have either entertainment or a moral. This one had neither.”)

“But it’s stupid to think that movies can foster crime,”
Bogie said. “When I was young we were reading about Billy the Kid. But that didn’t make criminals out of us. If you want
to find out what turns kids to crime look at their environ
ment and particularly their family life. Parents who let ten-
year-old kids stay out at night are the ones responsible for
making criminals.”

Dad deplored censorship and he said it would backfire.
“The Johnston office made a ruling that a criminal can’t use a sawed-off shotgun or a tommy gun in pictures,” he said.
“And movie cops have to be big and there has to be lots of
them. So when you show a capture it appeals to a child’s fa
vor of the underdog. Like when I got caught in
High Sierra.
I was up on that mountain with the whole state against me.”

Writing in the
New York Times
in November of 1948, Bo
gie came up with a “cure” for the gangster film.

Noting that he was a filmmaker and a man who was
about to become a father, he said that he had a special inter
est in the problem. The “problem” which seemed to be
emerging from all these antigangster film discussions was that the public was fascinated by the gangsters, not the police. “The reason for the gangster’s popularity,” Bogie said,
“is that we don’t hunt him singly or on equal terms. We call out a horde of squad cars, the National Guard, or the entire
FBI and, after hunting him down like a rabbit, fill him so full
of lead even his own mother wouldn’t recognize him. Or, if
we don’t, for the average American the rest of the story stops
moving until the gangster has by some good fortune or some
charming device on the writer’s part, got away and who in
the audience at this point is going to say to himself, ‘I like
those policemen’?

“The young gangster, running out into the street, or up
some alley, spraying the world he hates with bullets, may not
be as morally acceptable as the young Crazy Horse outwitting
an American army on the march, but as a dramatic device he
will catch the same amount of sympathy, killer though he is.

“The cure for the gangster film, then, seems eminently
simple to me. In
The Maltese Falcon
we sent a single individual
out against a lot of gangsters, and the result was a whole se
ries of pictures with the lone hero against gangsters instead
of vice-versa. We called him Sam Spade, but you could call
him Calvin Coolidge and still get the same effect if you held
to the rule. Of course, I don’t claim we’re changing basic
values. You have the cavalry for you winning money instead
of the Indians, but you are going to get some killings in
any event.”

What I find admirable in my father on this censorship is
sue was not that he was against censorship, as I am, but that
he was able to understand the other side, and not just paint
one side of the question all black and the other all white.
This, to me, is the mark of an intelligent person.

I suspect that, politically, I am much more like my father
than my mother. I think of my mother as a kind of knee-jerk
liberal, though it drives her crazy when I say that. I tend to
be liberal on some issues, like abortion and civil rights. But
I’m also conservative on others. For example, I believe in the
death penalty, which horrifies my mother.

You might think that all this would make for lively arguments between myself and Bacall. Not exactly. It is true that,
like my father, I love to argue. I’ll be glad to take any side of
an argument just for the fun of it. My mother enjoys a spir
ited discussion, also. But not with me.

My father, I think, was the more patient one of the two.
I think that if he were around today he would listen to me.
Politically, we are alike. It’s not that he would agree with my
views on each thing, but I think he would weigh each thing
separately and not get caught up in the ism, whether it be lib
eralism or conservatism.

My father was also a “personal-religionist,” which is a phrase
I’d never heard until I read it in a press release about him.
Basically, it means he didn’t practice his religion. I’m not re
ligious at all.