![]() Although he privately described himself as “Democrat in politics, Episcopalian by birth, dissenter by disposition,” he looked on acting as a trade like any other, though one calling for considerable crall and discipline. Their counterparts in Paris were meanwhile lamenting the early demise of Gabin as a “serious” talent and panting over Bogart for what the critic of Lc Matin called his “vitalisme, tendre et profond.”ġ once mentioned this awesome Gallic reputation lo Bogie and he was greatly amused by it. There was, I remember, a delightful period in the late thirties and early forties when American highbrows yearned for a native naturalistic actor as mighty as Jean Gabin. Hut it is a hazard peculiar to cultists in the arts - that is to say, to highbrows - that unless they keep their transatlantic signals open and alert, they tend to canonize foreign talents that are rejected on the home ground as commercial hacks. lie spoke his mind very freely on this as on most other subjects and he was consequently rarely idolized by aesthetes or the New Deal young as a serious actor, at least not in his own country. He was temperamentally disinclined to identify the actor with a priest or social reformer. He was never earnest about the choice of parts “worthy” of him, and 1 doubt he would ever have joined group theaters or studios dedicated lo the purifying or solemnizing of the mummer’s art. He was always content lo nestle in the camouflage of any fictional type that came his way, provided the manager paid him and left him to himself a very complex man, gentle at bottom and afraid to seem so. Not, certainly, to an actor who had had his troubles with the bartender’s tab and who was grateful to take any part for which his dark and glossy appearance qualified him. Such calculations belong to social historians, not to their subjects. He probably had no notion, in his endless strolls across the stage 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. But it obscured, in a smooth skin, bold eyes, and a lid of black hair, his essential character and its marvelous adaptability to one of the more glamorous neuroses of the incoming day and age: that of the unfooled “private eye,” the neutral skeptic in a world exploding with crusades and the treachery they invite. And, coincidentally, because our tennis player had a sardonic streak in him off stage that was just what the age of disillusion ordered.īogart would have been the first man to question that youth ever dropped its bloom on him. Mainly because between the nineteen twenties and the thirties the world was in for one of those ideological wrenches which, in destroying a social structure, suddenly date more symbols of it than prime ministers and courtesans, not least the prevailing fashion in romantic actors. Ten or more years later he gave currency to another phrase, with which the small fry of the English-speaking world brought the neighborhood sneak to heel: “Drop the gun, Looey!”Ĭould both these characters be Bogart, the cryptic Hemingway tough, the huddled man in the trench coat who singed the bad and the beautiful with the smoke he exhaled from his nostrils? Could any actor, no matter how lucky in his parts, how wide the gamut of his ambition, swing so successfully between the poles of make-believe represented by “Tennis, anyone?" and “Drop the gun, Looey”? He could and did. ![]() If the matinee matrons had any misgivings about the manliness of their hero they had the reassurance of a program note to the effect that the scar on his upper lip came from a wound received in naval combat. He himself had spent a year or two at one of the better private schools and was intended, by everybody but himself, for Yale. His father was a prominent New York surgeon, his mother a portrait painter of socialite children. This young man, whose performance the late Alexander Woollcott wrote “could be mercifully described as inadequate,” seemed to be cast by fortune for the role of a Riviera fixture. THIRTY years ago, toward the end of the first act of one of those footling country-house comedies which kept up the pretense that the First World War had merely grazed the Edwardian era, a dark-haired juvenile in an ascot and a blue blazer loped through the French windows and tossed off an invitation that was to become immortal: “Tennis, anyone?” Possibly he did not coin the phrase, but he glorified the type that used it, if lithe young men with brown eyes and no discoverable occupation can ever be said to go to glory, on stage or off.
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