Tough Guy

Whatever the "something special' is that constitutes a man's man and an actor's actor, he had it - and in abundance. Raised by a genteel East Coast family with a doctor father and a well-known artist mother, Humphrey DeForest Bogart emerged from a minor theatrical career in the 1920s to become one of Hollywood's most distinctive leading men, typically cast as smart, playful, courageous, tough, occasionally reckless characters who lived in a world of dames, mugs, and coppers, yet anchored by a hidden moral code - hard-boiled cynics who ultimately show a noble side. In "The Maltese Falcon," when Sydney Greenstreet's Kasper Gutman, says to Bogart's Sam Spade, "By Gad, sir, you are a character - there's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing," he might just as well have been describing the real-life Humphrey Bogart. Here was a man who could charm the birds off the trees one minute, and tell a producer to go straight to hell the next. They threw away the mold when he moved on. This fizzy cocktail of a book lifts the veil off the movie tough guy to reveal the real-life tough guy. It provides an unvarnished portrait of a hard-drinking, prankish extrovert whose heart was as soft as his screen lines were hard. You get a little history and a bit of sociology. But the fun comes from the abundant helping of irreverence. His contemporaries as well as subsequent observers have plenty to say about Bogie - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and his own brash words provide an affectionate, perceptive portrait of a marvelous, contradictory man.