Humphrey DeForest Bogart was the unlikeliest of film icons. At best, his looks were average. He spoke with a lisp. And for years he played mostly vicious gangsters and thugs who, instead of getting the girl, got slugs to the face and bullets to the belly.
But "Bogie" eventually found his way in films during a long period as a Warners contract player and was the preeminent male movie star for two decades until his untimely death from cancer at age 57.
Humphrey Bogart a Christmas Baby
The New York City native -- the name Bogart is Dutch for "orchard" -- was born to troubled heart-lung surgeon Belmont Bogart and his wife, Maud Humphrey, a wildly successful commercial illustrator and early feminist. Bogart's birth usually is listed as Christmas Day, 1899, although there is some dispute over that date.
Little Humphrey's debut came early. His mother famously made her curly-haired toddler the poster boy for Mellin's Baby Food.
Bogart and his two younger sisters grew up in a fashionable Upper West Side apartment and at the family's 55-acre estate in western New York.
Bogart's parents fought constantly and are remembered as less than ideal parents. Dr. Bogart reportedly was a morphine addict and his wife a driven career woman disinterested in parenting. "I was brought up very unsentimentally but very straightforwardly," he once remarked in what appeared to be understatement. "A kiss, in our family, was an event. Our mother and father didn't glug over my two sisters and me." (Jeffrey Meyers, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, Andre Deutsch, Ltd., London, 1997)
Mystery Surrounds Bogart's Famed Scar and Lisp
Bogart was a poor student at private schools and eventually was expelled from the prestigious Phillips Academy prep school in Massachusetts. (Some accounts claim he quit the school). At 18, Bogart enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served in France, reportedly helping ferry soldiers home after the Armistice.
The scar on his upper lip, plus that famed lisp, are sometimes reported as the result of a shrapnel wound. But along with his birthdate, there are several disputed versions about the lip and lisp. The truth probably will never be known.
After the Navy, Bogart bounced around in several minor jobs. Through a friend, he landed a gig as a stage manager. Bogart made his acting debut in 1921 with a one-line walk-on as a Japanese butler in the Alice Brady vehicle Drifting. (Brady may be best remembered today as Ginger Rogers' wacky society friend in Astaire and Rogers first co-starring film, The Gay Divorcee.)
As Stage Juvenile, Bogart Introduced Cliche "Tennis, anyone?"
Bogart slowly worked his way up to bigger Broadway roles, but was mostly typecast as callow rich kids. (Bogart is credited, to his dismay, for introducing the line, "Tennis, anyone?")
During the self-taught actor's apprenticeship, Bogart developed a reputation as a hard-drinking night owl. Louise Brooks once claimed Bogart's scar and lisp were, in fact, the results of a barroom brawl, not a wartime injury. (A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, Bogart, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1997)
Bogart's stage career lasted through 1935. He'd tried Hollywood a few years earlier, but was lost in mostly undistinguished film fare. It wasn't until he played the vicious mobster Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest that Bogart could consider the movies a viable career path.
Bogart Names Daughter After Loyal Co-Star Leslie Howard
Bogart's film career might never have developed were it not for his Forest co-star. Leslie Howard was reprising his starring role in the film version and used his clout to ensure Bogart would play Mantee in the 1936 movie.
(Bogart never forgot Howard's loyalty and in 1952 named his newborn daughter Leslie Howard Bogart.)
The film was a smash. Bogart stunned studio executives and audiences with his snarling portrayal of the feral Mantee. Bogart was a sensation, but it would be another five years until his persona -- that of the world-weary, hard-bitten, principled loner who lives by his own code -- would make him a movie superstar.
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In Part 2, Bogart makes The Maltese Falcon, meets and marries a stunning co-star and becomes an icon onscreen and a fulfilled family man in real life, after three earlier, unhappy marriages.
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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