The tension mounted, and the anxieties went pub-lic, showing up in his performance—in the tightness of the mouth, the weariness of the eyes, and the brusque, often unconvincing delivery of the lines. Huston thought of the Robert Morley character as a latter-day Kasper Gutman, the Fat Man of Maltese Falcon. But Sydney Green-street had a twinkle and liked to mix with the other members of the cast. Morley detested practical jokes and found Lorre "an intensely tiresome little chap with quite the foulest vocabulary I have ever had the misfortune to listen to." Rather than hear a nightly cascade of scat-ological words and off-color material, Robert took his meals in his room. Both leading ladies fell short of expectations. Gina Lollobrigida, the top-heavy Italian sex symbol, was of no interest to Humphrey. He pro-fessed himself "not a bosom man" and referred to her as "the Refriger-ator." Gina's great rival, Sophia Loren, cannily if bitchily observed that Gina was "good playing a peasant, but incapable of playing a lady"—something she was required to do here. Although Jones had a finishing school beauty, hers had been an irregular career. After playing radiant heroines in films like Since You Went Away and Cluny Brown, she appeared in a series of unprofitable films. She was miscast as a fiery half-breed in Duel in the Sun, and seemed out of place in the title role of Madame Bovary. Ruby Gentry, the story of a swamp girl in the Deep South, might have been more of the same had it not been for King Vidor's strong direction. The feature pleased audiences and returned Jennifer to the elite group of bankable stars. Still, she had never been known for comic ability, and Capote's daily contributions threw her off balance for most of the shoot. "I always wanted to know where my character was going," Jones complained, "whether she was going to drop dead or jump in the ocean or be knocked over the head . . . so it sometimes threw me a little bit not to know from day to day what she was going to do or not to do." On top of that, many of the Italian performers knew no English and spoke phonetically, giving their lines a strange, arrhythmic tone. Retake after retake was required. And then there was the business of
the unions. When the shoot was over, Humphrey remembered that
"Italian labor was divided into two camps: reds and whites. We weren't permitted to use the Commies, though they represented the best technicians." Besides all this there was Truman, who made no attempt to hide his homosexuality, swishing around wearing a lilac scarf and an ankle-length camel's hair coat. Humphrey, who made a habit of railing about "fags," didn't know what to make of this short, flamboyant Puck. At first he gave Truman a wide berth, mocking his gestures and loudly referring to him as "Caposey." But as the filming went on, he found himself beguiled by the little man. There were two reasons for Humphrey's turnaround. Truman could be outrageous, but he was a true professional, generating dia-logue on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. He never seemed to need a break, save for eccentricities like phoning Rome to speak to his pet raven, Lola (who answered back), and going to a hospital to take care of an impacted wisdom tooth (where he turned out twelve pages despite the pain). Also, the little man was a lot more combative than he looked. One afternoon Humphrey was feeling particularly macho. Sit-ting in the lobby of the Hotel Palumbo, he kept challenging various crew members to arm-wrestle as they passed through. These contests were won handily and, spotting Caposey, the champ called out, "How would you like to take me on?" Truman accepted the invitation, pulled up a chair, and locked fingers with him. Seconds later, Humphrey's arm was down and it stayed there. "Would you mind doing that again?" Humphrey inquired. "Yes, for fifty dollars." Hum-phrey put money on the table—and lost again. "As we stood up," Truman remembered, "he caught me in a bear hug. He meant it affectionately, but there was also a certain kind of frustration-malice in the way he did it. 'Cut that out, Bogie!' I said. But he kept on squeez-ing me. 'Cut that out!' I said and hooked my foot behind his leg and pushed. Boom!" Humphrey tumbled back and suffered a hairline fracture of the elbow. As Huston observed, Truman was "a little bull." Unfortunately, his taurine prowess resulted in a delay of filming while the star-producer received medical attention. Yet the two men became fast friends. "I really liked Bogie," Truman insisted. "He was one of my all-time favorite people." Humphrey had similar feelings; he wrote to Lauren, "Wait till you meet our screenwriter. You have never seen anything like him. At first, I didn't think he was real—but he grows on you and now I'd like to carry him around in my pocket and take him out when I need a laugh.
The Bogart reputation took off in the 193os when Broadway plays like The Petrified Forest crystallized the national angst. In the 194os, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca established Humphrey's reputation as the American male par excellence, operating in a compromised and often evil world, a man without illusions. "I don't mind a parasite," Rick tells Ugarte. "I object to a cut-rate one." Even so, this hard-bitten cynic has a heart—a vulnerable one, protected by a screen of acrimony and wisecracks: "Tell me," he asks Ilsa, "who was it you left me for? Was it Laszlo, or were there others in between? Or aren't you the kind that tells?" And now, in the 195os Humphrey was about to be plunged into an entirely new genre, a category that, at that point, had no name. A generation later, film critic Roger Ebert argued that Beat the Devil was the first "camp" movie, an accident waiting to happen. He praised Capote's elliptical dialogue, singling out Jones's line "They're desperate characters. Not one of them looked at my legs" and Lorre's description of time: "The Swiss manufacture it. The French hoard it. Italians want it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook." Ebert also took delight in the film's improvised style, "half-serious" attitude, and patent absurdities:
There's Nothing You Can Do About It. Nothing! 183
the ex-Hungarian Lorre, his hair dyed blond, is named O'Hara; the heavily accented Lollobrigida declares, "Emotionally I am English"; Humphrey claims, "I was an orphan until I was twenty. Then a rich and beautiful lady adopted me." There is a scene, Ebert points out, on a veranda overlooking the sea, "where Bogart and Jones play out their first flirtation, and by the end of their dialogue you can see they're all but cracking up; Bogart grins during the dissolve. The whole movie feels that way." That style was off-putting in the 195os, the mark of the unprofessional, the bum. Over the years, though, Beat the Devil made money by becoming a cult favorite. That cult had many members, but Humphrey was never one of them. "Only phonies think it's funny," he insisted. "It's a mess." True enough; even so, camp followers delighted in that mess. In her celebrated essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " Susan Sontag offers some definitions. "Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. . . . The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful." In a triumph of irony, the flam-boyant, sibilant Capote had taken two unassailable symbols of ur-masculinity, John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, thrown them both to the ground, and then helped them to their feet.
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