"Hump"

I'll never watch a Bogart movie the same way again. Why? I'm reading his biography. A splendid one at that.

"Bogart," by A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, combines the research of two writers whose documentation is almost unimaginable, it's so thorough. Notes say the source documents of just one of the writers weighed nearly half a ton.

HALF A TON, mind you. What's more, many of those items deftly make their way into this compelling narrative.

So what has skewed my view of Bogart--or "Hump" as he was known to friends? It's his history as a privileged but thoroughly abused child. Here are glimpses based on the biographers' interviews with Grace Lambert and other childhood friends, most of whom were summer companions at Canandaigua in the finger lakes district of western New York. In some ways, Humphrey had an idyllic childhood; in other ways, it was horrendous.

Firsthand sources say Bogart's parents were consumed by social pretenses and lucrative careers: father a New York City physician, mother a commercially successful, nationally renowned painter of angelic children's pictures. Her work made it into Butterick's Pattern books and many early 20th century women's magazines.

Yet the elder Bogarts were morphine addicts who left the rearing of their kids to--according to Lambert--"the most awful servants....Common people, with loud voices, ignorant...Oh, they were rough! They used to beat them and shout at them (at Humphrey and two younger sisters)...they (the servants)were HORRIBLE....And the mother and father didn't seem to notice."

Worse, when friends tried to report the violence, "Maud," Humphrey's tall, lean, beautiful mother (size 2 1/2 shoes to complement her mauve Victorian silks), threw things at them and refused to believe it. Humphrey, about 12 and present at the telling, began pounding his fists at his mother and screaming, "It's true, Mother; it's true!"

Possibly to escape, "Hump" was stagestruck as a teen. He would hang blankets across wires to serve as curtains for summer, lakeside performances starring him and his friends. He was close to the son of a prominent Broadway producer who also summered there (Humphrey LOVED hearing stories of what went on out front and behind the stages of NY City). Perhaps a vain act to preserve his 5'8" masculinity, he forever denied any true acting interest--claimed merely to have fallen into movies (a less respected career back then).

So what I'm eager for now is how he gets to Hollywood, how easily he marries and divorces his starlet friends, how he deals with industry allies and enemies, and what happens when all that chemistry gets stirred between him and Lauren Bacall (half his age when they meet, court, marry and have two kids).

No longer, though, shall I wonder at Bogart's edgy, dark, remote and angry countenance. From now on, I'll think of all he experienced as a child of parental negligence and addiction--and the fact that he died from cancer in his 58th year. Residuals of the wrong kind for a Hollywood great like this one!