Old Faces: Bogey Worship

Which actor had the piano player’s role in Casablanca?

If Dooley Wilson is your answer, you are In at Harvard, at least with the undergraduates. Humphrey Bogart is their newest major. At the Brattle Theater last week, after 15,000 viewers had seen 47 showings of 14 Bogey movies, the tenth Humphrey Bogart Festival ended. Harvard’s Bogey men knew their subject so well that they could tell within weeks when any picture of their hero had been taken. The yardstick is his receding hairline.

Essence of Cool. Bogart’s side-o-mouth repartee has become the canon vernacular of Harvard Yard, and anyone who doesn’t dig it is digging his social grave. Harvard boys, ordering another round of drinks, rasp: “Play it again, Sam.” Raising their glasses, they say: “Here’s looking at ya, kid!” And when they’re getting ready to blow the joint, they ask: “Ya ready, Slim?” When they want to express arrogance or individuality, they spit: “I don’t have to show you no stinking badge.” That line is so popular that one group pledged to write it into examination essays, and professors were soon reading about the “stinking badge” in papers on the French Revolution.

When Bogart lights a cigarette on the screen, girls respond with big, sexy sighs. Bogart alone could save the tobacco industry if there were only enough Radcliffe girls and Harvard boys to fill the nation. “It’s that special way Bogey grits his teeth, then parts his lips and sort of hisses that makes it so great,” explains Ciji Ware, a Radcliffe senior whose favorite swain, as she calls him, is Ted Landreth, the Harvard boy who in turn best imitates the way Bogey smoked. “Bogey,” she insists, “is everything we wish Harvard-men were, in addition to what they already are. Bogey’s direct and honest. He gets involved with his women, but he doesn’t go through an identity crisis every five minutes. He’s the ultimate man. He’s so rugged. So absolutely unattainable. The essence of cool.”

Basic Basset. Ciji and her peer group think that it is also the essence of cool to see Bogey films on the eve of examinations. “There’s something just so heroic about going to see something anti-intellectual the night before an exam,” she explains. “Like imitating Bogart’s I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude.”

Very few Harvard boys or Radcliffe girls have pictures of Bogart in their rooms because that sort of thing is looked down upon as “too Big Tenish.” They will never forgive John Huston for making Bogey a boozy simpleton in The African Queen. They don’t like The Caine Mutiny either: “Queeg is not good Bogey.” Key Largo is very good Bogey. And when Bogey pumps five slugs into Edward G. Robinson, the crowd has seen the picture so often that it shouts “More! More!” in perfect unison with his shots.

Even new Bogey fans have seen Casablanca five times. The Brattle Theater has a Blue Parrot room (for Sidney Greenstreet’s cafe in Casablanca); nearby a jukebox plays As Time Goes By over and over again. Girls there moon over Bogey’s half lisp and the glistening scintilla of saliva in the corners of his mouth. Boys compare insights. “His basset-hound look is part of his basic appeal,” mused one cultist. “Put in its cultural perspective, it makes him the all-American underdog.” Added another: “His hardness is superficial. Underneath he is good. The basic values are there.”

Around the tables, the dialogue goes on and on.