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Review by Edward Morris
As Jeffrey Meyers depicts him, Humphrey Bogart had just enough character flaws to be morally interesting. He was a tough guy who invariably wilted under the power of studio boss Jack Warner. He gallantly married the women he was most passionate about -- then cheated on them. He was a champion of free speech -- except when it ranged to the far left of his own liberal leanings. But in spite of these well-documented discrepancies, Bogart emerges here as a basically admirable figure, as well as one of the century's most charismatic actors.
Meyers is best known as a literary biographer, with studies of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Lowell, D.H. Lawrence and other poets, novelists, and critics to his credit. Psychologically, Humphrey Bogart was a fairly predictable product of an upper-class background and Depression-era insecurities. The first child of a surgeon and a nationally prominent magazine illustrator, Bogart was born in New York City on Christmas Day, 1899. Although clearly intelligent, he was a lazy and indifferent student in the series of ritzy schools he attended. After a brief hitch in the Navy, Bogart soon opted for an acting career. He appeared professionally in his first stage production when he was 20 and in his first movie at 30. Along the way to becoming a cultural icon, Bogart made four trips to the altar, his last with Lauren Bacall. All his wives were actresses. A notoriously heavy smoker and drinker, Bogart died of cancer of the esophagus in 1957.
While Meyers necessarily relies on secondary sources for much of the biography, he does add considerable new material through interviews with several figures who knew and worked with the actor, including his longtime assistant and mistress, Verita Peterson. For the benefit of readers who are not cultists, Meyers vividly details the plots and behind-the-scenes stories of Bogart's best movies -- and a few of the worst ones. He also devotes a chapter to Bogart's prickly encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee.
However, the great drama in Meyers's account is Bogart's unrelenting effort to do good work in the face of a tyrannical boss, bad scripts, persistent character stereotyping, distracting personal relationships, hard living, and his own ambivalence toward the importance of his profession. That Bogart succeeded so magnificently is a testament to both his talent and vision.
Edward Morris is a Nashville journalist.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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